gVisor vs Kata Containers

gVisor is a free, open-source Linux-compatible sandbox and application kernel for running containers while isolating the host from untrusted code. It is intended for workloads such as user-uploaded, LLM-generated, and third-party code. Instead of passing sandboxed applications’ system calls directly to the host, its Sentry handles them; a Gofer process mediates filesystem access. The project describes a least-privilege design with a restrictive system call filter. It documents use with Docker, Kubernetes, containerd, and OCI runtimes, including Kubernetes configurations using GKE Sandbox, Minikube, or containerd with the gVisor shim. gVisor can stream application trace points to an external threat detection engine such as Falco, and can checkpoint and restore containers. Most CUDA applications can run unmodified in the sandbox with selected NVIDIA driver versions, but GPU support is restricted to certain models, drivers, capabilities, device files, ioctl calls, and platforms. Installation requires Linux 5.6 or later on x86_64 or ARM64. Compatibility is best-effort, and some applications may not work because not every system call, /proc file, or /sys file is implemented. Hardware side-channel protection is generally not provided.

Kata Containers is a free, open-source Linux container runtime that uses lightweight virtual machines for workload isolation while remaining compatible with the container ecosystem. Each workload runs in a dedicated kernel, separating network, I/O, and memory; hardware virtualization can provide an additional defense layer. The runtime supports OCI container images, the Kubernetes CRI interface, and integrations with Docker and Kubernetes. Supported hypervisors include QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, and Firecracker. Listed hardware includes Nvidia GPU, FPGA, QAT, RDMA, and SR-IOV, with x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures. Kata requires nested virtualization or bare metal, and kata-check can check host capability. Installation guides cover CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, SLES, and Ubuntu. Listed cloud platforms include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Vexxhost OpenStack Cloud. The Apache 2.0 license permits use and distribution. Only the current monthly release series receives security fixes; older releases are unsupported and there are no long-term-support branches.