[HTCondor-users] Fwd: Major upgrade from Singularity to Apptainer coming

["Anderson, Stuart B." <sba@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Now that Apptainer 1.1.0 [1] is readily available from EPEL 8 is there
any need to couple this transition from singularity to a particular
release of Condor?

Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/releases/tag/v1.1.0


> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: "Open Science Grid" <help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Major upgrade from Singularity to Apptainer coming
> Date: August 22, 2022 at 2:09:51 PM PDT
> To: "Open Science Grid Helpdesk" <help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> This announcement is to inform the OSG community that big changes are
> coming within the next few weeks to Singularity.
> 
> For those of you who haven't heard, last November the Singularity
> project joined the Linux Foundation and changed its name to Apptainer:
>    https://apptainer.org/news/community-announcement-20211130
> 
> Apptainer 1.0 was released in March but so far it has not been in the
> epel Yum repo so it has not had very much use.  An Apptainer 1.1
> release candidate is now in epel-testing and when the final 1.1.0
> release is ready, expected within the next few weeks, it is planned to
> be released to epel.  After that time doing a "yum install
> singularity" will instead get apptainer.
> 
> Apptainer 1.1 has a major change of no longer installing any setuid-root
> portion by default.  This is now practical because most of the former
> functionality that required setuid-root can now be done with only
> unprivileged user namespaces.  That includes mounting SIF files, mounting
> EXT3 image files, and using overlays.  In addition, unprivileged users
> can now build container images without any special configuration by
> system administrators.
> 
> Site administrators that have installed the singularity RPM are encouraged
> to test upgrading ahead of the Apptainer 1.1 release on a test machine.
> See the OSG documentation starting at
>    https://osg-htc.org/docs/worker-node/install-apptainer/#choosing-whether-or-not-to-install-the-rpm
> 
> The Apptainer package has a "singularity" alias but in addition to the
> removal of the default setuid-root executable there are some minor
> incompatibilities compared to the Singularity package.  Everyone who
> supports software that uses singularity should read the documentation
> for details at
>    https://apptainer.org/docs/user/main/singularity_compatibility.html
> and make sure their software is ready.

--
Stuart Anderson
sba@xxxxxxxxxxx