LXC without chroot

LXC isn't a monolithic system. It's a collection of kernel features that can be used to isolate processes in various different ways, and a userspace tool to use all of these features together to create full-fledged containers. But the individual features are still usable on their own, without LXC. Furthermore, LXC does not require a chroot, and even when you give it a chroot, you can bind-mount directories from the host system into the container, sharing those particular directory trees between the host and the container.

For instance, cgroups are used by LXC to set resource limits on containers. But they can be used to set resource limits on groups of processes without using the LXC tools at all. You can manipulate /sys/fd/cgroup/memory or /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct directly, to put process into cgroups that limit the amount of memory or CPU they are allowed to use. Or if you're on a system using systemd, you can control the memory limits for a group of processes using MemoryLimit=200M or the like in the .service file for a given service.

If you want to use LXC to do lightweight resource management, you can do that with or without a chroot. When starting an LXC container, you can choose which resources you want to isolate; so you could create a container with only a virtualized network, and nothing else; or a container with only memory limits, but sharing everything else with the host. The only things that will be isolated are those specified in the configuration file for your container. For example, lxc ships with several example container definitions that only isolate the network; they share a root partition and almost everything else with the host. Here's how to run a container identical to the host system except it has no network interface:

 sudo lxc-execute -n foo -f /usr/share/doc/lxc/examples/lxc-no-netns.conf /bin/bash

If you want some files to be shared with the host, but not others, you have two choices; you could use a shared root directory, and mount over the files that you want to be different in the container; or you could use a chroot, but mount the files that you do want to share in the container.

For example, here's the configuration for a container that shares everything with the host except for /home; it instead bind-mounts /home/me/fake-home over /home within the container:

lxc.mount.entry = /home/me/fake-home /home none rw,bind 0 0

Or if you want to have a completely different root, but still share some directories like /usr, you can bind mount a few directories into a directory, and use that as the root of the filesystem.

So you have lots of options, and can choose to isolate just one component, more than one, or as many as LXC supports, depending on your needs.