Provide a common-runtime with machine-emulator-tools and use plain Dockerfile as template

[endersonmaia]

📚 Context

There's this idea of abstracting away the need to install the machine-emulator-tools and require the application developer to define some variables or wrap a call to the application execution with rollup-init.

This could all be done in the background, and application developers should only care about building a container that can run their applications, like they already do on other cloud runtime environments.

That's a responsibility of the runtime to adapt that container image to run on its environment.

✔️ Solution

sunodo build should prepare a common-runtime container image, with the right machine-emulator-tools installed and proper cartesi-init so that the application developer can provide only the Dockerfile for their application.

sunodo build would then create a rootfs for the application and inject it into the common-runtime rootfs and use crun to start the process ENTRYPOINT + CMD.

📈 Subtasks

• Create a package to hold the container image code for this common-runtime and publish to public registries;
• Add a flag to sunodo build to use the common-runtime strategy
• ...

🎯 Definition of Done

• It's possible to use all sunodo-templates without installing emulator-tools nor defining ROLLUPS_HTTP variables;

[endersonmaia]

Just reporting my findings during a couple days of evaluating options to create this minimal runtime.

• wolfi-os (melange, apko) is a great option but lacks upstream riscv64 builds
• nixpks is a little more difficult to learn and also lacks upstream riscv64 builds
• buildpacks lacks upstream riscv64 builds
• Canonical's chisel is good and we can use riscv64/ubuntu builds

If we were going to build our own minimal image without having to bootstrap the riscv64 build, I'd go with Docker Hub riscv64/ubuntu:22.04 and use chisel + copy some libs.

Contribution upstream would be creating the chisel slices for the components we need.

So, that's where I'm heading.

---

We have Ubuntu 24.04 as the next LTS release, but we don't have riscv64/ubuntu images for that yet.

Links to keep track:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/2039333
• https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/704943