Can someone clarify how this compares to LXD, released by Canonical in Ubuntu 16.04? A lot of the keywords and concepts seem similar.

And another different side of HyperContainer is that it follows OCI spec, check the runv project here: https://github.com/hyperhq/runv/, so technically speaking, it's a hypervisor version of OCI, just like docker is a linux container version of OCI. Seems rkt/clear linux or LXD does not.

The OCI Runtime spec is still a work in progress. Docker and HyperV are implementing parts of the current pre-release versions of the OCI Runtime spec.

You can use OCI Runtime bundles with rkt if you use the oci2aci[1] tool and rkt will be a full OCI runtime once the OCI Runtime and Image spec mature. We can use help to get these OCI projects[2][3] to v1.0 if you can spare cycles!

[1] https://github.com/huawei-openlab/oci2aci

[2] https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec

[3] https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec