What are the main differences between Podman and Singularity? (Possible FAQ)
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).
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).
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... /Anders
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@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
Hi, has you are talking about SELinux support below. Is there a way to prevent processes in a container to write to the disk or modify files? Any example would be great. I found https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/htm... but I want not able to restrict the disk access and still be able to start the container. thanks, Hendrik On 6/8/20 10:19 PM, Daniel Walsh wrote:
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@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
_______________________________________________ Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
On 6/8/20 16:49, Hendrik Haddorp wrote:
Hi,
has you are talking about SELinux support below. Is there a way to prevent processes in a container to write to the disk or modify files? Any example would be great. I found https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/htm...
but I want not able to restrict the disk access and still be able to start the container.
thanks, Hendrik
$ podman run --read-only -ti fedora sh # id uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) # touch /dan touch: cannot touch '/dan': Read-only file system # The only place the container is able to write is to tmpfs mounted in the container.
On 6/8/20 10:19 PM, Daniel Walsh wrote:
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@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
_______________________________________________ Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
thanks, had never read about that switch, makes me wonder what other cool features I might have overlooked as well On 6/8/20 11:39 PM, Daniel Walsh wrote:
On 6/8/20 16:49, Hendrik Haddorp wrote:
Hi,
has you are talking about SELinux support below. Is there a way to prevent processes in a container to write to the disk or modify files? Any example would be great. I found https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/htm...
but I want not able to restrict the disk access and still be able to start the container.
thanks, Hendrik $ podman run --read-only -ti fedora sh # id uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) # touch /dan touch: cannot touch '/dan': Read-only file system #
The only place the container is able to write is to tmpfs mounted in the container.
On 6/8/20 10:19 PM, Daniel Walsh wrote:
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@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
Daniel Walsh wrote:
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.
That is great to hear (about the HPC features), looking forward to following both Open Source projects (i.e. Podman and Singularity) Interesting to hear about the planned Mac and Win support, maybe there will be no need for a podman-machine project either then... /Anders
On 6/9/20 14:16, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Daniel Walsh wrote:
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. That is great to hear (about the HPC features), looking forward to following both Open Source projects (i.e. Podman and Singularity)
Interesting to hear about the planned Mac and Win support, maybe there will be no need for a podman-machine project either then...
/Anders _______________________________________________ Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
No I think we will always need an opensource VM to handle the remote VM.
participants (4)
-
Anders F Björklund -
Daniel Walsh -
Erik Sjölund -
Hendrik Haddorp