Re: Hosting first-party kernel.org container images

[Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>]

Hi Guillaume,

On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 03:44:13PM +0100, Guillaume Tucker wrote:
> This boils things down to a few practical options:
> 
> 1. treating TuxMake images with kernel.org toolchains as the de facto
>    stardard,
> 
> 2. creating a repository from scratch on git.kernel.org with
>    independent hosting for base images,
> 
> 3. some middle ground to be defined which would remove the risks
>    associated with third parties without duplicating efforts.
> 
> I feel it would be good to have more maintainers' feedback though.
> 
> Nathan, Nicolas, Miguel - what are your thoughts on this?

To be entirely honest, I do not really have a strong opinion here. I
generally agree with your thoughts around branded container images,
although I do think that TuxMake's images tend to be fairly lean, so
those easily could become the recommended images without many downsides
aside from maybe where they are hosted and how they are maintained.
Having a clean set of Containerfiles on git.kernel.org does not sound
like a bad idea, especially if they would be structured in such a way
that other entities could customize them for their use case further. I
guess its usefulness really depends on the other stakeholders like
KernelCI. It seems like there has to be some sort of buy in from the
kernel.org administrators around hosting built container images
somewhere on kernel.org though, as I don't think the regular developer
is going to want to build images locally. Not really sure what that
looks like.

Cheers,
Nathan