14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Clear Linux and Clear Containers teams are happy to introduce the next-generation of Intel's Clear Containers project, version 3.0, which bring many important new features and performance improvements.
Rewritten in the Go language, Intel Clear Containers 3.0 introduces support for leveraging code used for namespace-based containers and better integrates into the container ecosystem, allowing support for Docker container engine and Kubernetes. It also improves the compatibility with the POSIX family of standards.
"Today’s release presents a generational and architectural shift to utilize virtcontainers, a modular and hypervisor agnostic library for hardware virtualized containers. Clear Containers 3.0 is written in Go language and boasts an OCI compatible runtime implementation (cc-runtime) that works both on top of virtcontainers, and as a platform for deployment," said Amy L Leeland, Technical Program Manager, Intel Corporation.
Additionally, this release ships with a new agent based on the libcontainer library that has been designed from the offset to let users apply filters and policies, such as the well-known SELinux and seccomp security facilities found in the Linux kernel, inside the Clear Containers guests.
Storage performance improvements via virtio-blk storage backend
To improve storage performance, Intel Clear Containers 3.0 brings support for the virtio-blk storage backend. On top of that, there's Kernel SamePage Merging (KSM) throttling support, which promises to improve container density and scaling, and it's now possible to run untouched Clear Containers on VMWare virtual machines and Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor.
Besides numerous other small bug fixes and improvements that you can study in the release notes page, which contains a complete list of changes implemented in this release, Intel's Clear Containers 3.0 introduces support for OCI defined use cases (CPU and RAM) by enabling availability of new resource constraints.
Intel Clear Containers 3.0 is an open source project can be downloaded right now from its GitHub page, where you can learn more about it and understand how it works. If you're interested in running Clear Linux on your infrastructure, don't hesitate to visit its homepage and download the latest installation images for Intel architectures.