Charliecloud vs youki

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.

youki is a Linux container runtime written in Rust that implements the OCI runtime specification. It provides commands to create, start, list, inspect, and delete containers, and can run containers without root privileges. The project documents using it as a runtime with Docker and Podman, and reports passing containerd’s end-to-end test and adoption in several production environments. Building locally requires Rust edition 2024 and Linux kernel 5.3 or later; local builds are supported on Linux, with Vagrant environments and GitHub Codespaces available for trying it elsewhere. The project is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project. youki is free under the Apache License, Version 2.0, which grants no-charge, royalty-free copyright and patent licenses subject to its terms. Security reports can be sent through GitHub Security Advisories or to the committers by email. The committers aim to triage reports and respond within seven days, though a fix may take longer.