SingularityCE 3.11 was released on 10th February, and is available for download from the
GitHub release page.
This version brings a host of new features, including:
Contributions to SingularityCE 3.11
Shortly after the release of SingularityCE 3.10, we looked at the
contributions that led to that new version, using vsoch’s excellent
citelang analysis tool.
Let’s use the same approach, running citelang against all the first-party code (including SIF, service clients, etc.) and documentation repositories that make up SingularityCE, and totaling the lines added or modified by each contributor:
This gives us a grand total of 17,950 lines of code touched between 3.10 and 3.11, similar to the size of the 3.9 to 3.10 development cycle. Just as with the 3.10 release, work on the 3.11 release was mostly performed by Sylabs employees, but with significant contributions from the open source community.
Thanks especially to vsoch for introducing the `instance stats` resource monitoring command, and Fotis Nikolaidis for OCSP support and collaboration on the PEM key & X.509 signing / verification flows.
SingularityCE 3.11 vs Apptainer 1.1
For the SingularityCE 3.11 release we’ve again imported significantly less code from Apptainer than Apptainer imports from SingularityCE. This is to be expected, as we are taking a different path toward increased OCI compatibility and the expansion of unprivileged workflows. In addition, Sylabs drives almost all of the development
of SIF (the Singularity Image Format), and the service client dependencies that are
forked by Apptainer.
While Apptainer 1.1 has moved aggressively toward non-setuid execution by default, and has introduced various implicit, but distinct, modes for the `–fakeroot` option and unprivileged builds, we have chosen to take a more gradual approach in 3.11 and to hold larger changes for a major version release at 4.0. We’re very aware of the fact that SingularityCE is often employed in environments that value stability above all else, and are running older Linux distribution releases that may still limit the ability to use, or practically deploy, a fully unprivileged container runtime.
Looking on the other side of the fork, Apptainer has merged 95
pull requests that originate in SingularityCE since their v1.0.0 release, plus
all work carried out on SIF. This clearly demonstrates the value of the bug fixes and general feature additions being developed for SingularityCE, and the benefits of our commitment to open source licensing, to other projects.
