Singularity Desktop for macOS

[Eric Condamine]

Hello !

Singularity works under Linux OS. But under macOS, we need another virtual machine layer to generate a Linux environment first. The easiest approach would be using a Singularity container within a Unbuntu VirtualBox. For this reason, the SingularityCE community maintains a set of Vagrant Boxes.

In fact, I'm not sure this is a good idea. Indeed, running a container in a virtual machine loses all the advantages of the container. We have done some tests and if a Singularity container is really interesting in terms of performance, using a virtual machine is a less efficient solution in terms of speed, fluidity, in short for performance.

In 2019, the first beta version of Singularity Desktop for macOS was announced.

Since then, it seems that the idea has been abandoned and there is no longer any trace of this development project on the Sylabs website.

Has this project been completely scrapped?

In my opinion, this would be a bad idea, as Windows has recently introduced a true Linux kernel and the first tests we have done indicate that a Singularity container will run on a Windows workstation. There would only be MacOs to deal with ... and the Singularity container could be virtually used on all 3 major OS ...

All the best.

Eric

[David Trudgian]

Hello,

SingularityCE has been retired. There were announcements on the LBL hosted Singularity mailing list (prior to the fork) around a year ago about this. Sylabs has decided to focus our efforts on SingularityCE and PRO for Linux, and there wasn't really any appetite among the community to maintain the macOS and VM related code. We do, as you mention, maintain the Vagrant boxes.

To your broader point, though, about VMs.... Singularity Desktop for Mac still *did* use a Virtual Machine under the hood (xhyve). SingularityCE is a Linux container runtime. It uses concepts like namespaces that are specific to Linux. MacOS does not have those namespace, cgroups etc. concepts that are used to create containers on Linux, so it can't be a direct target of a Linux container runtime. Therefore, the containers have to run inside of a Linux VM. Docker for Mac is similar. If you run Docker containers on a Mac, they are running inside a Linux VM that the Docker app manages for you.

If you are using WSL2 on Windows, which is required for Singularity (WSL1 will not support it), you are using a Virtual Machine also. The detail is hidden from you, but WSL2 runs that Linux kernel inside a Hyper-V virtual machine. (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versions).

Bottom line is that you will always be using a VM to run Linux containers on Windows or Mac... the variable is just how much that VM is handled for you, and hidden from view.

Cheers,

DT

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David Trudgian

Sylabs Inc.

[David Trudgian]

SingularityCE has been retired....

Whoops! This is not true :-) Singularity Desktop for Mac was retired. Not SingularityCE!

Apologies for my faulty brain to typing hands connection.

DT

[Eric Condamine]

Dear David,

Thank you for your quick and clear answer.

We would like to distribute an application under the three main OS (Linux, Windows and MacOs). We thought that using a Singularity container would be the right solution to make installation easier for the user and maintenance easier for the developers.

Tests carried out on Linux (Fedora) have shown great results in terms of performance.

So we still have to find the right VM for MacOs to have good performance. The tests we have done so far were not very good.

Maybe we didn't use the right method ? Do you know if the method described on the syslabs website gives good performance results?

The tests done with WSL2 on Windows allowed the installation of the singularity container. I don't have any feedback yet on the performance in this case, the person who did it just told me that the installation worked, I still need to get some performance information.

Thanks again for the information.

All the best

ERic

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[Steven Fleck]

I was wondering if you were able to use the method described on the syslabs website to install Singularity on your Mac. I tried using it before reading your thread, but I had trouble getting it to work. When I run "vagrant up" I get this error:

There was an error while executing `VBoxManage`, a CLI used by Vagrant for controlling VirtualBox. The command and stderr is shown below.
Command: ["startvm", "a0ca0a11-c2f8-4ce5-bb05-9755d3e124e1", "--type", "headless"]
Stderr: VBoxManage: error: The virtual machine 'vm-singularity_default_1636079830616_37479' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1 (0x1)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine

It seems like other people had this same problem, but were able to solve it by changing Security and Privacy settings as described here. Unfortunately for me, the changes didn't fix the issue for me. Did you have luck installing it and if so, would you share your installation process? Thank you

[David Trudgian]

There are some known issues like this with VirtualBox on macOS Monterey (if you've upgraded).

This thread may be useful: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=104249