History
Origin
bootc is the top layer of a roughly fifteen-year lineage of work led by Colin Walters at Red Hat. The thread starts with OSTree (2011), a system for version-controlled, atomically updated bootable filesystem trees, managed Git-style as a library (libostree) plus a CLI. On top of libostree sits rpm-ostree, which adds a hybrid image-plus-package model: a base commit with RPMs layered on it, used to drive Fedora CoreOS, Silverblue, and IoT (LWN, Article 979182).
The step that made bootc possible was teaching ostree to treat OCI/Docker images as a transport for an ostree commit. Fedora declared this "ostree native containers" feature stable and introduced bootc as the new, purpose-built interface, with the stated plan of moving Fedora editions to OCI delivery (Fedora Project Wiki, Changes/OstreeNativeContainerStable). bootc's pitch is to make creating an OS image as easy as creating an application container, with the same tools.
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2011 | OSTree project begins; the underlying technology bootc still uses today. |
| 2022 | The bootc repository is created (GitHub repository createdAt 2022-11-30). |
| 2024 | DevConf.cz keynote on bootable containers; the project lives under containers/bootc. |
| 2025 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2025-01-21; RHEL 10 ships bootc as the path for new images. |
| 2026 | Active releases continue; latest tag at the documented commit is v1.16.2. |
How it evolved
The project moved from a research feature inside rpm-ostree to a standalone CLI and library. The README marks the current state: the CLI and API are considered stable, with a commitment that every existing system can be upgraded in place across future changes (README.md:22-23). Versioning follows semantic versioning, a practice the project dates from the 1.2.0 release (README.md:33-37).
A second evolution is the storage backend. The original backend is the ostree-container store. The codebase now carries a parallel composefs backend under crates/lib/src/bootc_composefs/, and the runtime dispatches between the two at the top of each operation. composefs is a separate Red Hat project that was proposed to the CNCF Sandbox in the same batch as bootc.
When the project joined the CNCF, it moved from the containers GitHub organisation to a dedicated bootc-dev organisation; the crate manifests still point repository at https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc (crates/lib/Cargo.toml:6).
Where it stands now
bootc is a CNCF Sandbox project (accepted 2025-01-21) maintained primarily by Red Hat engineers, with governance and maintainer files in the repository (GOVERNANCE.md, MAINTAINERS.md). The crate pins edition 2024 and a minimum Rust of 1.85.0, kept close to what ships in the latest RHEL 9 (crates/lib/Cargo.toml:3,10-11). The stated direction is to be the successor to ostree and to seamlessly carry forward its existing users (ADOPTERS.md:23-24).