Nydus image is a container accelerated image format provided by the Dragonfly image-service project, which offers the ability to pull image data on demand, without waiting for the entire image pull to complete and then start the container. It has been in production and shown vast improvements over the OCI v1 image format in terms of container launching speed, image space, and network bandwidth efficiency, as well as data integrity. Nydus image can be flexibly configured as a FUSE-based user-space filesystem or in-kernel FS with nydus daemon in user-space:

• Lightweight integration with VM-based containers runtime like KataContainers. KataContainers is supported Nydus as a native image acceleration solution.
• Nydus closely cooperates with Linux in-kernel disk filesystem containers' rootfs can directly be set up by EROFS over Fscache with lazy pulling capability. The corresponding changes has been in Linux kernel since v5.19.

Nydus has been running steadily for 3 years in Alibaba Cloud, Ant Group, and ByteDance, supporting large-scale container clusters and the creation of millions of containers per day, serving thousands of customers in various business fields.

Podman is a user-friendly container runtime, we'd like to make it support Nydus images as well, so we created the nydus store plugin project like stargz store plugin, the project implements an additional layer store plugin for CRI-O/Podman, so that nydus images can be mounted with lazy pulling. The plugin depends on additional layer store plugin feature, uses go fuse implementation to interact with podman in filesystem, and nydusd does the actual remote mount for nydus image.

Now we would like to ask the community's opinion if we can propose to make the nydus store plugin as a non-core subproject of the containers community, we believe that the donation to containers will attract more users and developers for nydus itself and bring much value to the containers community users.

Looking forward to any feedback, thanks!