• Kata Containers
• • Introduction
  • License
  • Platform support
  • • Hardware requirements
  • Getting started
  • Documentation
  • Configuration
  • Hypervisors
  • Community
  • Getting help
  • • Raising issues
  • Developers
  • • Components
    • Main components
    • Additional components
    • Packaging and releases
  • Glossary of Terms

Kata Containers

Welcome to Kata Containers!

This repository is the home of the Kata Containers code for the 2.0 and newer
releases.

If you want to learn about Kata Containers, visit the main
Kata Containers website.

Introduction

Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a
standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and
perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security
advantages of VMs.

License

The code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
See the license file for further details.

Platform support

Kata Containers currently runs on 64-bit systems supporting the following
technologies:

Architecture	Virtualization technology
x86_64, amd64	Intel VT-x, AMD SVM
aarch64 ("arm64")	ARM Hyp
ppc64le	IBM Power
s390x	IBM Z & LinuxONE SIE

Hardware requirements

The Kata Containers runtime provides a command to
determine if your host system is capable of running and creating a
Kata Container:

$ kata-runtime check

Notes:

• This command runs a number of checks including connecting to the
  network to determine if a newer release of Kata Containers is
  available on GitHub. If you do not wish this to check to run, add
  the --no-network-checks option.

• By default, only a brief success / failure message is printed.
  If more details are needed, the --verbose flag can be used to display the
  list of all the checks performed.

• If the command is run as the root user additional checks are
  run (including checking if another incompatible hypervisor is running).
  When running as root, network checks are automatically disabled.

Getting started

See the installation documentation.

Documentation

See the official documentation including:

• Installation guides
• Developer guide
• Design documents
  • Architecture overview

Configuration

Kata Containers uses a single
configuration file
which contains a number of sections for various parts of the Kata
Containers system including the runtime, the
agent and the hypervisor.

Hypervisors

See the hypervisors document and the
Hypervisor specific configuration details.

Community

To learn more about the project, its community and governance, see the
community repository. This is
the first place to go if you wish to contribute to the project.

Getting help

See the community section for ways to contact us.

Raising issues

Please raise an issue
in this repository.

Note:
If you are reporting a security issue, please follow the vulnerability reporting process

Developers

See the developer guide.

Components

Main components

The table below lists the core parts of the project:

Component	Type	Description
runtime	core	Main component run by a container manager and providing a containerd shimv2 runtime implementation.
agent	core	Management process running inside the virtual machine / POD that sets up the container environment.
documentation	documentation	Documentation common to all components (such as design and install documentation).
libraries	core	Library crates shared by multiple Kata Container components or published to crates.io
tests	tests	Excludes unit tests which live with the main code.

Additional components

The table below lists the remaining parts of the project:

Component	Type	Description
packaging	infrastructure	Scripts and metadata for producing packaged binaries (components, hypervisors, kernel and rootfs).
kernel	kernel	Linux kernel used by the hypervisor to boot the guest image. Patches are stored here.
osbuilder	infrastructure	Tool to create "mini O/S" rootfs and initrd images and kernel for the hypervisor.
agent-ctl	utility	Tool that provides low-level access for testing the agent.
trace-forwarder	utility	Agent tracing helper.
runk	utility	Standard OCI container runtime based on the agent.
ci	CI	Continuous Integration configuration files and scripts.
katacontainers.io	Source for the katacontainers.io site.

Packaging and releases

Kata Containers is now
available natively for most distributions.
However, packaging scripts and metadata are still used to generate snap and GitHub releases. See
the components section for further details.

Glossary of Terms

See the glossary of terms related to Kata Containers.