crun vs Enroot
crun
github.comEnroot
github.comSide by side
| Figure | crun | Enroot |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 8.5 (#5) | 7.7 (#11) |
| Integrations | The README documents an Ansible role for automating installation of a statically linked binary and says a Lua binding is available. | Standard hooks can provide NVIDIA GPU support and inject Mellanox host MOFED for InfiniBand HCA support into containers. |
| Purpose | crun is a fast, low-memory-footprint OCI container runtime written in C. | Enroot turns traditional container and OS images into unprivileged sandboxes. |
| Security reporting | The security policy directs vulnerability reports through GitHub Security Advisories rather than public issues or pull requests. | The security policy asks reporters to disclose vulnerabilities by emailing [email protected] instead of opening an issue or pull request. |
Plans
In their own words
crun
crun is a free, self-hosted OCI container runtime for Linux, written in C. It conforms to the OCI Container Runtime specifications and provides CLI operations for creating, running, executing commands in, listing, pausing, resuming, updating, checkpointing and restoring containers. It can generate a configuration for unprivileged use and creates a user namespace when run by a non-root user. The project documents integration with Podman, an Ansible role for installing a statically linked binary and a Lua binding. Build instructions cover Fedora, RHEL/CentOS Stream 9 and 10, Ubuntu, Alpine and openSUSE Tumbleweed; release binaries are listed for Linux amd64 and arm64, including variants without systemd. Official release artifacts are signed, with GPG verification commands provided. The project reports a benchmark of 100 sequential `/bin/true` containers completing in 1.69 seconds with crun versus 3.34 seconds with runc on the author's machine. The manual marks cgroup v1 support as deprecated. Regular patch releases target the latest version; fixes for earlier versions are best effort and not guaranteed.
Enroot
Enroot is a free, open-source Linux command-line utility that turns traditional container and operating-system images into unprivileged sandboxes. It is aimed at high-performance or virtualized environments where portability and reproducibility matter and additional isolation is not required. Enroot runs without a daemon and supports unprivileged multi-user use without a setuid binary. Linux user and mount namespaces preserve filesystem separation, while the project provides little to no isolation. The command line covers batch, bundle, create, exec, export, import, list, remove, and start operations. It imports known formats including Docker, with the README reporting a 3x to 5x speedup for large Docker-image imports. Built-in GPU support uses libnvidia-container, and hooks can add NVIDIA support or Mellanox host MOFED. Runtime settings come from enroot.conf or higher-priority environment variables. Standard and hardened package flavors are available.