Apptainer

trollfactory

Good afternoon everyone,

Just joining the community here. I was wondering if there would be anyone interested here in potentially working with me to port Apptainer to android? I am really impressed with the developer docs here, and it seems like a great community. I understand that Apptainer has a presence in arm64 already with ubuntu / rhel. My background is in high performance computing/ GPU dev/ reverse engineering relative to cryptanalysis. I feel this would be a good community to achieve this effort in. I understand google has stated their position is to stick with their kvm support, but I think apptainer would be an excellent direct hardware access containerization option for mobile devices.

If enough people want to partake, I will get a git repo going and add people as necessary.

Happy devving.

ev6x

I know next to nothing about coding, so would you mind explaining a little what would be the use case of porting Apptainer to Android?

I'm curious because, from an outside perspective, I'm unable to see why you'd want it on Android? As per the Apptainer git:

Apptainer is an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Many container platforms are available, but Apptainer is designed for ease-of-use on shared systems and in high performance computing (HPC) environments. It features:

An immutable single-file container image format, supporting cryptographic signatures and encryption.
Integration over isolation by default. Easily make use of GPUs, high speed networks, parallel filesystems on a cluster or server.
Mobility of compute. The single file SIF container format is easy to transport and share.
A simple, effective security model. You are the same user inside a container as outside, and cannot gain additional privilege on the host system by default.

I am under the impression that Android's -- and in particular GrapheneOS' -- sandboxing is already superior to most/all Linux distros?

I'm simply asking out of ignorance and curiosity.