Getting Started Contributor Guide

This is a guide to help new contributors in Kata Containers community navigate through all the docs to help them get started.

There are many areas where new contributors can help out. This is a high-level list of all the Kata components:

• Community
  • Anything related to governance of the project.
  • Information on how to contribute
• Documentation
  • Contains all the Kata Containers general documentation files.
• Runtime
  • This is the main repo for the Kata runtime
  • The structure is broken down into the following directories:
    • arch - Custom Makefile architecture options for amd64, arm64, and ppc64.
    • cli - Kata Containers main command line interface.
    • cli/config - Kata Containers configuration file.
    • data - Runtime collection script and cli completion script.
    • netmon - Network monitoring process
    • vendor - Third party golang libraries. For information on how to update this, see the vendoring document.
    • virtcontainers - Main library used to build hardware-virtualized container runtimes.
• Agent
  • This is the repo where we keep the code for the Kata agent. The Kata agent runs in the Kata VM rootfs or initrd. The main purpose for the Kata agent is to manage the container in the Kata VM.
• Proxy
  • This is the repo where we keep the code for the Kata proxy. The Kata proxy runs on the host machine (either VM with nested virtualization or bare-metal machine). The main purpose of the Kata proxy is for the runtime to communicate with the Kata agent.
• Shim
  • This is the repo where we keep the code for the Kata shim. The Kata shim runs on the host machine (either VM with nested virtualization or bare-metal machine). The main purpose of the Kata shim is to route stdio and signals between the host machine and the containers.
• Osbuilder
  • This repo contains all the scripts related to building rootfs or initrd images and kernels for the Kata VM.
• Tests
  • This repo container all the scripts that are executed by the Kata CI tests.

Links for Beginners

• Here's a a presentations on how the Kata Containers community works and what you need to know to become a Kata Containers contributor.