Frequently Asked Questions
As we receive questions we'll fill in the frequent ones here.
How does image-builder fit into the Image Builder ecosystem?
The Image Builder team provides a bunch of tools that people can use to build, define, and customize operating system images. Amongst those are:
- The Image Builder service on the Red Hat Console which lets users build images through an API or user interface, automatically upload images to their favorite hyperscalers. It integrates there with various other services such as custom content.
- osbuild-composer is the component that provides APIs for the Image Builder service in such a way that you can host them locally.
- weldr-client is an application that uses the osbuild-composer provided APIs to offer a local command line program to start, stop, and manage builds.
The above can be quite confusing, hence we've created image-builder. It allows you to do the same things as weldr-client except it does so without the need to run osbuild-composer. Builds are done directly without going through other layers. This makes image-builder easier to install and use in a lot of environments.
Why does image-builder need root permissions?
For image types where we need to work with filesystems we need root. Mounting and working with filesystems is not namespaced in the Linux kernel and mounting filesystems is generally considered to be "running untrusted code in the kernel" hence it requires root permissions.
Built-in distributions
- Fedora
- CentOS
- RHEL