Dave Cottlehuber:
14.2-RELEASE now includes OCI-compatible images, and the Podman toolkit on FreeBSD is ready to use them, on both amd64 and arm64 systems.
In the aarch64 and amd64 download directories, you’ll see 3 official OCI-format images. The naming may be a little confusing at first, but should make sense once you start using them.
Each image comprises a subset of a standard FreeBSD
base.txzrelease tarball, for various use cases.
It’s taken a long time, but it’s great to see support for Docker-style workflows on FreeBSD. I never found using jails directly to be a suitable substitute, and using Docker more was one of the reasons I stopped using FreeBSD on the desktop, and my servers back in 2019.
Dave Cottlehuber on Lobsters with some additional details:
[OP here] dfr@ has ported the podman tooling to FreeBSD, so that the existing kernel jail functionality can be used with podman tools, and OCI images. The releng team has integrated his tooling to generate images that are produced entirely within the official FreeBSD Release process, thus giving a high degree of trust and provenance.
You can then import these into your own FreeBSD tools, and play with them as you like.
But what you get at runtime is a bona fide FreeBSD jail, with the same FreeBSD goodies you would expect.
My personal observation, at least in these early days, is that it makes building and deploying custom jails much simpler, as it allows deploying as a single step, as the build already combined base container + app + storage in a single step. Managing secrets for databases etc still needs to be done separately.