Charliecloud vs Inclavare Containers

Charliecloud is free, open-source container software for high-performance computing on Linux. It runs containers without privileged operations or daemons by using Linux user namespaces, with minimal configuration changes on computing-center resources. Users can build images, push and pull them to registries, and use accelerators such as GPUs. Its layer-free build cache is based on Git rather than union-mount filesystems and tarballs, and Dockerfiles are parsed with a formal grammar. The ch-image tool supports registry authentication and registries including GitLab Container Registry. At runtime, ch-run can inject host resources through the Container Device Interface, including NVIDIA GPUs and Cray networking. Installation is available from a release tarball, Git checkout, Spack, or Fedora/EPEL. Charliecloud requires Linux user namespaces and has been run on x86-64, ARM, and Power; current testing covers x86_64 and ARM. It is distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0. The project supports only the current release and provides no internal security boundary.

Inclavare Containers is a free, open-source Linux container runtime for launching protected containers in hardware-assisted Trusted Execution Environments. It creates hardware-enforced isolation between a tenant workload and privileged cloud-provider software. Its Enclave Attestation Architecture provides remote attestation that sensitive workloads run on trusted TEE hardware. The rune component is described as compliant with the OCI Runtime specification, while documented integrations include dockerd, containerd, and pouchd. Deployment can use Occlum LibOS or WebAssembly Micro Runtime, and Rats-TLS provides an attested secured channel between heterogeneous TEEs. shim-rune handles enclave signing and management between containerd and rune; epm manages cache pools for enclave startup. The project is cloud-platform agnostic and can run on public-cloud Kubernetes platforms. It supports Kubernetes CRI, uses the OCI image format, and documents Linux hosts including Ubuntu 18.04 and Alibaba Linux 2. Installation is described through source builds or RPM/DEB repositories.