Open Guest Compute Service is a Linux open source project to further the development of a production quality implementation of Linux Hyper-V container on Windows (LCOW). It's designed to run inside a custom Linux OS for supporting Linux container payload.
The original version of LCOW v1 was designed to run directly through Docker against the HCS (Host Compute Service) on Windows. This workflow is no longer supported by this repository however it has not been intentionally broken. If you would like to continue to use LCOW v1 there is a branch lcow_v1 that is the LKG branch previous to the removal of LCOW v1 from the master branchline. All future efforts are focused on LCOW v2.
The primary difference between LCOW v1 and LCOW v2 is that v1 was designed to hide the concept of the Utility VM. The caller created a Linux container and operated on the container as if it was natively running on Windows. In the background a lightweight Utility VM was created that actually hosted the container but this was not visible and its resources not controllable via the caller. Although this works, it severly limited certain abilities such as the concept of Kubernetes pod or placing multiple LCOW containers in a single hypervisor boundary and set of resources.
Thus LCOW v2 was created which has two primary differences.
- The Utility VM backing the Linux containers is a first class construct. Thus it can be managed in a lifetime seperate from the actual containers running in it.
- The communication from host to guest is no longer done via the platform. This means that
LCOW v2can iterate simply by imporving its host/guest protocol with no need for taking Windows updates.
The focus of LCOW v2 as a replacement of LCOW v1 is through the coordination and work that has gone into containerd/containerd and its Runtime V2 interface. To see our containerd hostside shim please look here Microsoft/hcsshim/cmd/containerd-shim-runhcs-v1.
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.
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We also ask that contributors sign their commits using git commit -s or git commit --signoff to certify they either authored the work themselves or otherwise have permission to use it in this project.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.