youki: A container runtime in Rust

youki is an implementation of the OCI runtime-spec in Rust, similar to runc.
Your ideas are welcome here.

🏷️ About the name

youki is pronounced as /joʊki/ or yoh-key. youki is named after the Japanese word 'youki', which means 'a container'. In Japanese language, youki also means 'cheerful', 'merry', or 'hilarious'.

🚀 Quick Start

[!TIP] You can immediately set up your environment with youki on GitHub Codespaces and try it out.

just build
docker run --runtime youki hello-world
sudo podman run --cgroup-manager=cgroupfs --runtime /workspaces/youki/youki hello-world

User Documentation

🎯 Motivation

Here is why we are writing a new container runtime in Rust.

• Rust is one of the best languages to implement the oci-runtime spec. Many very nice container tools are currently written in Go. However, the container runtime requires the use of system calls, which requires a bit of special handling when implemented in Go. This is tricky (e.g. namespaces(7), fork(2)); with Rust too, but it's not that tricky. And, unlike in C, Rust provides the benefit of memory safety. While Rust is not yet a major player in the container field, it has the potential to contribute a lot: something this project attempts to exemplify.

• youki has the potential to be faster and use less memory than runc, and therefore work in environments with tight memory usage requirements. Here is a simple benchmark of a container from creation to deletion.

  Runtime	Time (mean ± σ)	Range (min … max)	vs youki(mean)	Version
  youki	111.5 ms ± 11.6 ms	84.0 ms ± 142.5 ms	100%	0.3.3
  runc	224.6 ms ± 12.0 ms	190.5 ms ± 255.4 ms	200%	1.1.7
  crun	47.3 ms ± 2.8 ms	42.4 ms ± 56.2 ms	42%	1.15

  • A command used for the benchmark

    hyperfine --prepare 'sudo sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' --warmup 10 --min-runs 100 'sudo ./youki create -b tutorial a && sudo ./youki start a && sudo ./youki delete -f a'
    

  • Environment

    $ ./youki info
    Version           0.3.3
    Commit            4f3c8307
    Kernel-Release    6.5.0-35-generic
    Kernel-Version    #35~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue May  7 09:00:52 UTC 2
    Architecture      x86_64
    Operating System  Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS
    Cores             16
    Total Memory      63870
    Cgroup setup      unified
    Cgroup mounts
    Namespaces        enabled
      mount           enabled
      uts             enabled
      ipc             enabled
      user            enabled
      pid             enabled
      network         enabled
      cgroup          enabled
    Capabilities
    CAP_BPF           available
    CAP_PERFMON       available
    CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE available
    

• I have fun implementing this. In fact, this may be the most important.

📍 Status of youki

youki has aced real-world use cases, including containerd's e2e test, and is now adopted by several production environments. See Adopters and Use Cases for public examples. We have our roadmap.

🔗 Related project

• youki-dev/oci-spec-rs - OCI Runtime and Image Spec in Rust

🎨 Design and implementation of youki

The User and Developer Documentation for youki is hosted at https://youki-dev.github.io/youki/

🎬 Getting Started

Local build is only supported on Linux. For other platforms, please use the Vagrantfile that we have prepared. You can also spin up a fully preconfigured development environment in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.

Requires

• Rust(See here), edition 2024
• linux kernel ≥ 5.3

Dependencies

To install just, follow the instruction here.

Debian, Ubuntu and related distributions

sudo apt-get install    \
      pkg-config        \
      libsystemd-dev    \
      build-essential   \
      libelf-dev        \
      libseccomp-dev    \
      libclang-dev      \
      libssl-dev

Fedora, CentOS, RHEL and related distributions

sudo dnf install            \
      pkg-config            \
      systemd-devel         \
      elfutils-libelf-devel \
      libseccomp-devel      \
      clang-devel           \
      openssl-devel

Build

git clone [email protected]:youki-dev/youki.git
cd youki
just youki-dev # or youki-release
./youki -h # you can get information about youki command

Tutorial

Requires

• Docker(See here)

以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗