containerd

stargz-snapshotter

Go2022–2025

containerd / stargz-snapshotter

stargz-snapshotter

Fast container image distribution plugin with lazy pulling

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9Distinct people

11Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.6KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Fast container image distribution plugin with lazy pulling

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

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Also in these discussions

dragonflyoss/nydus · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-01-06 22:21:45 UTC to 2025-11-07 11:08:41 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	1	4
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3

What Hacker News says

11 sources

darthShadow·Nov 7, 2025

Just curious, was something like https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter considered/evaluated before designing your own lazily-loaded container FS and if so, any pros/cons for the same?

In We built a cloud GPU notebook that boots in seconds

westurner·Sep 17, 2025

Containerd/nerdctl supports a number of snapshotter plugins: Nydus, e Stargz, SOCI: Seekable OCI, fuse-overlayfs; containerd/stargz-snapshotter: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter containerd/nerdctl//docs/nydus.md: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/nydus.m... : nydusify and Check Nydus image: https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus/blob/master/docs/nydus... : > Nydusify provides a checker to validate Nydus image, the checklist includes image manifest, Nydus bootstrap, file metadata, and data consistency in rootfs with the original OCI image. Meanwhile, the checker dumps OCI & Nydus image information to output (default) directory. nydus: https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus awslabs/soci-snapshotter: https://github.com/awslabs/soci-snapshotter ; lazy start standard OCI images /? lxc copy on write: https://

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www.google.com/search?q=lxc+copy+on+write : lxc-copy supports btrfs, zfs, lvm, overlayfs lxc/incus: "Add OCI image support" https://github.com/lxc/incus/issues/908 opencontainers/image-spec; OCI Image spec: https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec opencontainers/distribution-spec; OCI Image distribution spec: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec But then in the opencontainers/runtime-spec//config.md OCI runtime spec TODO bundle config.json there is an example of a config.json https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/main/con... The LXC approach is to run systemd in the container. The quadlet approach is to not run systemd /sbin/init in the container; instead create .container files in /etc/containers/systemd/ (rootful) or ~/.config/containers/systemd/*.container (for rootless) so that the host systemd manages and logs the container processes. Then realized you said QEMU not LXC. LXD: https://canonical.com/lxd : > LXD provides both [QEMU,] KVM-based VMs and system containers based on LXC – that can run a full Linux OS – in a single open source virtualisation platform. LXD has numerous built-in management features, including live migration, snapshots, resource restrictions, projects and profiles, and governs the interaction with various storage and networking options. From https://documentation.ubuntu.com/lxd/latest/reference/storag... : > LXD supports the following storage drivers for storing images, instances and custom volumes: > Btrfs, CephFS, Ceph Object, Ceph RBD, Dell PowerFlex, Pure Storage, HPE Alletra, Directory, LVM, ZFS You can run Podman or Docker within an LXD host; with or without a backing storage pool. FWIU it's possible for containers in an LXD VM to use BTRFS, ZFS, or KVM storage drivers to create e.g. BTRFS subvolumes instead of running overlayfs within the VM by editing storage.conf.

In How Container Filesystem Works: Building a Docker-Like Container from Scratch

jauntywundrkind·Jul 9, 2025

Or pax. https://linux.die.net/man/1/pax Or eStargz. https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter Or Nydus RAFS. https://github.com/dragonflyoss/nydus Links for your mentioned zpaq and dwarFS https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/zpaq.html https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs

In Ptar: Replacing .tgz for petabyte-scale S3 archives

nurple·Apr 29, 2024

Look at the stargazing snapshotter if you have access to deploy it. I pulls small blobs of the image as they're used by the host, and it tries to use heuristics to put startup data in the initial blob. https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

In Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

nurple·Apr 13, 2024

A lazy chunked delivery strategy like used in the k8s stargz-snapshotter[0] project could be effective here, where it only pulls chunks as needed, but it would probably require wasm platform changes. [0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

In Tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm (2023)

jacobwg·Jul 18, 2023Submission

Show HN: depot.ai – easily embed ML / AI models in your Dockerfile

Hey HN! We're excited to launch https://depot.ai today - depot.ai is an open-source Docker registry that makes it easy to embed public models from Hugging Face in your Docker images using a `COPY`: # Copy all files from the model repo to the current WORKDIR COPY --link --from=depot.ai/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 / . # COPY just one file from the model repo to the current WORKDIR COPY --link --from=depot.ai/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 /v1-5-pruned.ckpt . To optimize build speed, cache hits, and registry storage, we're building each image reproducibly and indexing the contents with eStargz[0]. The image is stored on Cloudflare R2, and served via a Cloudflare Worker. Everything is open source[1]! Compared to alternatives like `git lfs clone` or downloading your model at runtime, embedding it with `COPY` produces layers t

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hat are cache-stable, with identical hash digests across rebuilds. This means they can be fully cached, even if your base image or source code changes. And for Docker builders that enable eStargz, copying single files from the image will download only the requested files. eStargz can be enabled in a variety of image builders[2], and we’ve enabled it by default on Depot[3]. Here’s an announcement post with more details: https://depot.dev/blog/depot-ai. We’d love to hear any feedback you may have! [0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/estargz.md [1] https://github.com/depot/depot.ai [2] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/integration.md#ima… [3] https://depot.dev

7 points · Open discussion

badLiveware·Aug 1, 2022

Lazy pulling is already supported by a lot of container runtimes, most notably containerd with estargz https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/d...

In Ask HN: Have You Left Kubernetes?

juancampa·Mar 17, 2022Submission

EStargz: Lazy pull container images for faster cold starts

2 points · Open discussion

adamgordonbell·Feb 20, 2022

To make OCI images start faster, use stargz. See the image here: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter It's a lazy file system for images.

In How to optimize the security, size and build speed of Docker images

jarpineh·Feb 1, 2022

This is interesting and seems general purpose. Not merely for container images. There’s this option for OCI containers which I don’t pretend to understand: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter It is used by containerd and nerdctl. You do have to build the image with it. Images work in OCI compatible registry. By fetching most used files first container can be started before loading is finished. Or so I gather.

In Speeding up LXC container pull by up to 3x

adamgordonbell·Jan 6, 2022

You might not need to care about image size at all if your image can be packaged as stargz. stargz is a gamechanger for startup time. kubernetes and podman support it, and docker support is likely coming. It lazy loads the filesystem on start-up, making network requests for things as needed and therefore can often start up large images very fast. Take a look at the startup graph here: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

In Optimizing Docker image size and why it matters