Sysbox relies on functionality that is currently only present in Ubuntu Linux. As a result Ubuntu is the only distro supported at this time. We are working on adding support for more distros.
Sysbox requires recent Ubuntu versions:
- Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa"
- Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine"
- Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" (point releases older than 18.04.4 require kernel upgrade)
These versions carry some new Linux kernel features that Sysbox relies on to create the system containers.
NOTE: If you have a relatively old Ubuntu 18.04 release (e.g. 18.04.3), you need to upgrade the kernel to >= 5.0. We recommend using Ubuntu's LTS-enablement package to do the upgrade as follows:
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04 -y
Recent Ubuntu kernels carry a module called shiftfs
that Sysbox uses as part
of its container isolation strategy.
However, some Ubuntu cloud images do not carry the module. In this case, Sysbox requires that Docker be configured in userns-remap mode.
The Sysbox installer will detect this condition and can automatically put Docker in userns-remap mode if desired. See here for details.