Lxroot - a software virtualization tool

About Lxroot

lxroot is a lightweight and safe alternative to chroot, Docker, and other software virtualization tools.

lxroot allows a non-root user to easily and safely create a "chroot-style" virtual software environment (via Linux namespaces), and then run one or more programs inside that environment.

Project Status

As of September 2023, Lxroot is still under intermittent development. I seem to work on Lxroot several times per year. Typically, when I work on Lxroot, I spend several days either adding new features or refactoring existing features to make Lxroot easier to use.

I personally run software inside Lxroot every hour of every day, all year long. As time passes, I am increasing the quantity and variety of programs that I run inside of Lxroot.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the only person who uses Lxroot regularly. Therefore, I have been investing my energy in improving Lxroot, rather than documenting the improvements and publishing updates. Therefore, if you are interested in using Lxroot, please let me know so that I can provide you with the updated and improved source code.

Lxroot Worlds

As of September 2023, I now call an Lxroot-based chroot-style-environment a "world".

To manually create Apline Linux world named alpine, I could (for example), do the following:

$  mkdir  -p  alpine/newroot    #  this directory is required.
$  tar  xzf  alpine-minirootfs.tar.gz  -C alpine/newroot
$  mkdir  alpine/home           #  this directory is optional.
$  mkdir  alpine/tmp            #  this directory is optional.
$  lxroot  alpine               #  use Lxroot to enter the world.

When Lxroot runs, the following directories will be bind-mounted into alpine/newroot:

source           target
alpine/home  ->  alpine/newroot/home
alpine/tmp   ->  alpine/newroot/tmp

Then Lxroot will chroot into alpine/newroot.

Any of newroot, home, and tmp can be symbolic links. This allows directories to be shared across multiple worlds. (Lxroot can bind-mount any subdirectory into newroot, not just the two examples shown above.)

On a Linux kernel version 5.11 and later, Lxroot can also create and chroot into a kernel-level overlay filesystem. An Lxroot-world can simultaneously use both an overlay filesystem and one or more bind-mounted subdirectories.

I have written custom scripts that create Lxroot-worlds based on various Linux distributions. The below table summaries the types of Lxroot-worlds that I regularly create and/or use. The distros are ordered from most commonly used (by me) to least commonly used.

Notes: (1) I have not yet published mk-alpine.sh and mk-arch.sh. (2) It has been a long time since I used Void Linux inside Lxroot, but there is a good chance that XBPS will "just work" inside Lxroot.

(Aside: Previously, I used a separate tool called vland to create and work with Lxroot environments. However, vland is now obsolete and unsupported. vland's functionality was either (a) moved into Lxroot itself, or (b) moved into smaller, stand-alone scripts.)

Videos

• Lxroot presentation at PackagingCon 2021: abstract | slides | video