Bootc: Use Your Container Knowledge and Infrastructure to Build and Deploy Your Ubuntu Hosts

ilvipero · March 31, 2026, 10:24am

Abstract

Managing Ubuntu hosts traditionally means configuration management, package updates, and drift control using tools like Puppet, Chef, or shell automation. But what if you could manage your Ubuntu hosts the same way you manage your containerized applications? With bootc, a CNCF Sandbox project, you can define your Ubuntu systems as OCI container images and deploy them consistently across bare metal, virtual machines, edge devices, or cloud environments. Instead of treating the operating system as something configured after installation, bootc allows you to treat it as an image built, tested, versioned, and promoted through the same CI and GitOps workflows you already use for containers. The bootc community is distribution-agnostic and we would love to see Ubuntu fully represented in the bootc world through officially packaged components and well-maintained base images. Ubuntu’s strong packaging standards, LTS cadence, and cloud presence make it a natural fit for image-based operating system workflows. In this session, we will explore: How bootable container images work How to build an Ubuntu-based bootable container image How to integrate the build into your CI or GitOps pipeline How to test and promote OS images just like application containers How to use the bootc CLI to install and update systems across VMs, bare metal, or edge environments By the end of the talk, you will understand not only how to use bootc with Ubuntu, but also how the Ubuntu community can help shape the future of image-based Linux operating systems.

Speaker Bio

Joseph Marrero Corchado (@https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-marrero-82b50480/ https://fosstodon.org/@jmarrero)
Joseph Marrero Corchado is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, specializing in bootable containers, image-mode systems, and cloud infrastructure. With over a decade of experience, he has contributed to open-source communities and enterprise software. His experience encompasses image-mode OSes, Kubernetes, cloud-native buildpacks, and middleware.

jpbennett · May 27, 2026, 10:32am

What filesystem technology is used to provide the Atomic capabilities? Is this BTRFS snapshots, Or SquashFS, or another technology?

Edit: seems like this question was sufficiently answered later in the talk.

lpil · May 27, 2026, 10:46am

Very cool talk, thank you!

You mentioned that bootc is used by graphical systems such as the Steam Deck and Bazzite. Would bootc be practical for configuring personal computers? For example, a laptop and a desktop with my desired packages and configurations? Or a home server?

dariuszd · May 27, 2026, 11:00am

Is bootc suitable for running a minimal host for running containers similarly to what you can achieve with e.g. Fedora CoreOS ?

lpil · May 28, 2026, 9:31am

Thanks for answering my question live! I want to try this for my machines for sure. Do you know of any documentation, guides, or open source examples that I could learn from?

jmarrero · May 28, 2026, 6:10pm

Hi! I’m glad you found bootc interesting.

You can try the same example I showed in the session here:

github.com/jmarrero/ubuntu-bootc

GUIDE.md

main

# Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with bootc -- Getting Started Guide

This guide walks you through converting an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS VM into a bootc-managed
system using composefs. By the end you will have an immutable, image-based Ubuntu
system that can be updated atomically via container images.

## Prerequisites

### Host requirements

You need a Linux host with KVM support and the following packages:

```bash
# Fedora
sudo dnf install qemu-kvm edk2-ovmf genisoimage libguestfs-tools

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install qemu-system-x86 ovmf genisoimage libguestfs-tools
```

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It has a few too many steps right now, but I’m hoping to upstream fixes and build a more generic Ubuntu image so this becomes simpler in the future, similar to other bootc-native distributions.

For upstream docs and examples, the best starting point is:

lpil · June 1, 2026, 1:51pm

Wonderful, thank you!

Do you know of a similar guide for other distributions that Bootc currently works best with? Using ubuntu is appealing, but I would like to stay on the easy path while I’m learning.