Clear Containers use KVM/QEMU to create virtual machines where Docker containers will run:
Although Clear Containers can run with any recent QEMU release, containers boot time and memory
footprint are significantly optimized by using a specific QEMU version called qemu-lite.
qemu-lite improvements comes through a new pc-lite machine type, mostly by:
- Removing many of the legacy hardware devices support so that the guest kernel does not waste time initializing devices of no use for containers.
- Skipping the guest BIOS/firmware and jumping straight to the Clear Containers kernel.