On 6/8/20 07:00, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Erik Sjölund wrote:
> Regarding the email thread:
> "We are working on creating a FAQ for Podman"
>
> I'm curious about the question:
> What are the main differences between Podman and Singularity?
>
> I think in the academic world Singularity has become quite popular.
>
> The PhD students in my work place build the SIF (Singularity Image
> Format) file on their local computer and then copy it to the cluster
> with the scp command and run it there. (In some research HPC compute
> clusters they have installed Singularity)
>
> (Not so much of an answer but I tried to describe the situation where
> I get the question).
Podman is getting quite Popular in the HPC world and competing against
singularity.
One major issue with Singularity recently is that it dropped
"enterprise" support, and
since RHEL supports Podman, customers are working with us on it.
But in the opensource world people are also interested in moving HPC
workloads to
the OCI/Container world.
We have added lots of features to make Podman more attractive to HPC. A
few of them
being
1 Rootless Podman - HPC Customers want to run their containers with as
little privilege as possible
2 ignore_chown_errors - We added a field to containers/storage
storage.conf to allow HPC Customers to setup
their environments to be able to run any container from a container
registry like quay.io or docker.io within a single UID. Basically this
flag tells containers/storage when it pulls and image and has a file not
owned by root to ignore the error when it attempts to chown it to
non-root. This means the file remains owned by root of the
usernamespace, meaning the users UID.
3. We have added support for containers.conf which allows administrators
including HPC users, to customer the defaults of podman. HPC users tend
to want to run with limited namespaces and additional volumes mounted
into their containers.
We have several features in Podman that are better then signularity.
Starting with working with the OCI World, better namespace support,
better security with SELinux, SECCOMP, User namespace support.
> I agree, I have done some presentations on both Podman and
Singularity.
> Will post the presentation links over at
https://boot2podman.github.io/
>
> Sometimes I think that Podman focuses too much on competing with Docker.
> And that Docker focuses more on Mac and Win (not Linux), these days...
We want to be able to work in all domains. As I stated above we have
been working with the HPC Community,
we are working on MAC/Windows support and continue to concentrate on
linux features.
But we are an opensource project, so we will work where the community
takes us.
>
> /Anders
> _______________________________________________
> Podman mailing list -- podman(a)lists.podman.io
> To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave(a)lists.podman.io