There are three main goals of the Image Manifest Specification.
The first goal is content-addressable images, by supporting an image model where the image's configuration can be hashed to generate a unique ID for the image and its components.
The second goal is to allow multi-architecture images, through a "fat manifest" which references image manifests for platform-specific versions of an image.
Unlike the [image index](image-index.md), which contains information about a set of images that can span a variety of architectures and operating systems, an image manifest provides a configuration and set of layers for a single container image for a specific architecture and operating system.
This REQUIRED property specifies the image manifest schema version.
For this version of the specification, this MUST be `2` to ensure backward compatibility with older versions of Docker. The value of this field will not change. This field MAY be removed in a future version of the specification.
- **`mediaType`** *string*
This property is *reserved* for use, to [maintain compatibility][matrix].
When used, this field contains the media type of this document, which differs from the [descriptor](descriptor.md#properties) use of `mediaType`.
- **`config`** *[descriptor](descriptor.md)*
This REQUIRED property references a configuration object for a container, by digest.
Beyond the [descriptor requirements](descriptor.md#properties), the value has the following additional restrictions:
- **`mediaType`** *string*
This [descriptor property](descriptor.md#properties) has additional restrictions for `config`.
Implementations MUST support at least the following media types: