Building ISOs from OCI containers

TL;DR: Write a Containerfile, use image-builder to convert it to an ISO with a live environment.

bootc revolutionized how we build and consume image-based systems: just build an OCI container in your preferred git forge, publish it in a registry, and voilà, anyone can come and rebase their bootc-based system to it. A great example is Bazzite: one of the most popular gaming-oriented distributions today.

However, the first-day experience is still lacking: the installers don’t run in a live environment, and their building process is a nightmare and far from container-friendly.

The team behind the osbuild/image-builder project recently started experimenting with introducing a way to build an ISO with a live environment directly from an OCI container image. All techniques you know from building bootc systems can be applied here, so the build pipelines can be shared. Additionally, if you want such an ISO to be a bootc installer, the resulting artifact will be surprisingly small due to the high level of deduplication.

Come to this talk to learn how to build your own ISO using just a bunch of podman commands!

https://github.com/osbuild/image-builder-cli https://osbuild.org/docs/developer-guide/projects/image-builder/usage/#bootc