compared to Singularity

[hv15]

Hi there, is enroot similar to Singularity?

[3XX0]

You could say so, I didn't really look into the latest Singularity (since they rewrite things quite often and have a pretty bad track record IMHO) but the main difference is that enroot is designed for simplicity and extensibility. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel and follows closely the UNIX philosophy. It's also fully unprivileged and will get you proper GPU support.

It can also be compared to other chroot-like runtimes, for example CharlieCloud or Shifter.

[hv15]

thanks for the answer. Yes I've had several problems using Singularity as well, in particular getting GPU support working. I administer a small cluster of heterogeneous nodes and our setup doesn't really fit into the configuration design of Singularity. I hacked together a solution based on https://github.com/NVIDIA/libnvidia-container, but its not very stable and not very usable for my users.

I hadn't even heard of CharlieCloud and Shifter, thanks for pointing these out, thanks! I think I'll give enroot a go :)