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Table 1 Feature comparison between major container systems and virtual machines (VM)

From: LPMX: a pure rootless composable container system

Features

LPMX

Docker

Singularity

VM

udocker

podman

Composabilitya

Y

N

N

N

N

N

Pure rootlessb

Y

Ne

N

N

Y

Ne

Use docker image

Y

Y

Y

N

Y

Y

Use singularity image

Y

N

Y

N

N

N

Support layered filesystem

Y

Y

N

N

N

Y

Run programs statically linked to glibc

Nd

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

GPGPU support

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

  1. aAllow processes in one container to make exec calls to other processes on the host or in other containers via standard posix application programming interface (API), such as posix_spawn
  2. bDo not require root/sudo privileges in any stage, such as when installing a container system and its dependencies, nor when creating containers
  3. cSingularity supports only up to two layers, but creating and using an overlay layer requires root privileges in practice
  4. dProprietary software is occasionally statically linked to glibc
  5. ePodman and rootless Docker themselves can be installed without root privileges, although installing and configuring dependencies, such as uidmap, and some kernel parameters require root privileges on major Linux distributions in HPC