First Look at Image Mode for RHEL | RHEL Presents Ep. 78

For episode 78 I brought in two of my favorite people from the RHEL business unit, product manager Ben Brouillard and TMM Matt Micene, to take our first look at image mode for RHEL. The price of admission was agreeing to Ben’s new intro bumper, star-shaped glasses and all. Image mode is the idea that you build, ship, and run the operating system itself with the same container tooling you already use for applications, and we got to see it work live.

A few things worth carrying away from the conversation:

• The command at the heart of image mode is bootc, and yes, there’s a story behind the glasses. Ben explained that bootc was written by their coworker Colin, and the star-shaped glasses are a nod to funk bassist Bootsy Collins, a mnemonic so you remember the tool’s name.
• You describe the OS in a Containerfile, but the target is a real machine, not a running container. Matt walked through a short Containerfile built on a bootc base image, then kickstarted a VM where Anaconda pulls the container image straight onto disk, no packages block required, and the whole build-and-boot cycle ran in a couple of minutes.
• Image mode gives you image-based updates and rollbacks driven by whatever CI and registry you already have. A deployed host watches its origin registry and applies updates when the image changes, and Matt even ran a surprise GitHub Actions demo to prove the pipeline works with any CI system and registry.

If you’ve been curious what it looks like to treat RHEL itself like a container image, this one is a solid place to start.