kaiten

README

Kaiten

Kaiten is an experimental container runtime built in Go that combines a content-addressed snapshot store with a virtual filesystem and Linux namespace isolation. It imports Linux root filesystems, stores them as deduplicated snapshots, and executes them inside isolated runtime environments.

Project Status: Experimental (v0.1.0)

Features

• Content-addressed object storage
• Content-defined chunking with deduplication
• Snapshot creation and restoration
• FUSE-based virtual filesystem
• Lazy loading of file contents
• Linux namespace isolation (PID, Mount, IPC, UTS)
• pivot_root()-based root filesystem switching
• Symbolic link support
• Import existing Linux root filesystems
• Snapshot history, checkout, and garbage collection

Requirements

• Linux
• Go 1.24+
• FUSE
• Root privileges (required for running containers)

Building

git clone https://github.com/Gthamsrim1/kaiten.git
cd kaiten

go build -o kaiten ./cmd/kaiten

Usage

Import a root filesystem

./kaiten import /path/to/rootfs

Example using Alpine:

./kaiten import /tmp/alpine/rootfs

List snapshots

./kaiten snapshots

View snapshot history

./kaiten log

Checkout a snapshot

./kaiten checkout <snapshot-id>

Run a container

sudo ./kaiten run /bin/sh

or

sudo ./kaiten run echo Hello, Kaiten!

Garbage collect unused objects

./kaiten gc

Project Structure

cmd/            CLI
internal/
    chunk/      Content-defined chunking
    persist/    Snapshot persistence
    runtime/    Container runtime
    tree/       Virtual filesystem

Roadmap

• cgroup v2 support
• Container networking
• Bind mounts
• /dev management
• User namespaces
• OCI image support

License