Hello, everyone
Does Balena have any plans to upgrade the Balena Engine repository to use a newer version of Moby? I really like the project, especially the delta feature, which is central to the offline-based IoT device project I’m working on.
Moreover, is it possible to add support for the zstd compression algorithm (e.g., pulling images with layers compressed using zstd)?
Thanks in advance!
Hi @caiodev1 , welcome to Balena!
We are looking at rebasing balena Engine on top of latest upstream Moby at the moment, however don’t have a set date for when this would be released. The main blocker to this at the moment is the lack of space in the root partition, which we are actively working on resolving in a safe manner.
Regarding zstd compression, it sounds like it would result in better UX on our platform, and requires BuildKit. BuildKit is already incorporated into the Engine as of OS v2.94.0, but there is no option to use zstd when building an image that users can pass to our image builders. To reduce maintenance load, our builders currently don’t support all image build use cases. However, you can build your own OCI-compliant images using the build tool of your choosing and deploy on our platform using balena deploy. Maybe you could try this?
Thanks,
Christina