What’s New in SingularityCE 4.2

This section highlights important changes in SingularityCE 4.2 that are of note to system administrators. See also the “What’s New” section in the User Guide for user-facing changes.

If you are upgrading from a 3.x version of SingularityCE we recommend also reviewing the “What’s New” section for 4.0.

Configuration

  • Additional directives in singularity.conf allow the use of namespaces to be restricted in native mode. See Namespace Options.

  • The new --netns-path flag takes a path to a network namespace to join when starting a container. The root user may join any network namespace. An unprivileged user can only join a network namespace specified in the new allowed netns paths directive in singularity.conf, if they are also listed in allow net users / allow net groups. Not currently supported with --fakeroot, or in --oci mode. See Networking Options.

Requirements

  • Go 1.22.5 or above is now required to build SingularityCE due to indirect dependencies.

  • OCI-Mode now supports embedded writable overlays, which can be added to OCI-SIF files with singularity overlay create. This functionality requires fuse2fs version 1.46.6 or above.

  • SingularityCE 4.2 does not support EL 7 and SLES 12. The mainstream end-of-life dates for these distributions are 2024-06-30 and 2024-10-31 respectively.