RancherOS For Linux

RancherOS is an open-source and freely distributed operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed from the ground up to run as Docker containers, including all system services and programs.

The RancherOS ISO image comes with several boot options to allow users to start the operating system, automatically login on tty1 and ttyS0 consoles, debug the logging, as well as to automatically login on tty1 and ttyS0 plus debug logging, and access the recovery console.

The first selected boot option will be automatically started in 5 seconds if you don't select one of the available boot options. From the boot menu, it's also possible to access a previous RancherOS version, if you have one installed on the target machine, or the current one.

RancherOS is supported on numerous platforms, including virtual machines like VMware, Hyper-V, and Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), as well as cloud environments like OpenStack, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Digital Ocean, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), Amazon Machine Images (AMI), and Alibaba Cloud.

Images for 4G-LTE are available as well, and RancherOS is currently supported on 64-bit (amd64) and AArch64 (ARM64) architectures. The images are distributed as ISO and IMG binary files, but also as rootfs tarballs and specific formats for the supported platforms.

Running RancherOS as a Docker container was achieved by starting up two instances of Docker, one called the "system Docker" to run the first process, and the "user Docker" for creating containers. This way, it's not possible to delete the entire operating system with the docker rm -f $(docker ps -qa) command.

RancherOS isn't for everyone. It's designed for deployment in production at scale to make it easier to run Docker for all of your containerization needs. RancherOS is, in fact, a Docker container, and it ships with a small number of pre-installed packages, only those required to run Docker.