Welcome to the v2.1.0 release of containerd!

The first minor release of containerd 2.x focuses on continued stability alongside
new features and improvements. This is the first time-based released for containerd.
Most the feature set and core functionality has long been stable and harderened in production
environments, so now we transition to a balance of timely delivery of new functionality
with the same high confidence in stability and performance.

Highlights

• Add no_sync option to boost boltDB performance on ephemeral environments (#10745)
• Add content create event (#11006)
• Erofs snapshotter and differ (#10705)

Container Runtime Interface (CRI)

• Update CRI to use transfer service for image pull by default (#8515)
• Support multiple cni plugin bin dirs (#11311)
• Support container restore through CRI/Kubernetes (#10365)
• Add OCI/Image Volume Source support (#10579)
• Enable Writable cgroups for unprivileged containers (#11131)
• Fix recursive RLock() mutex acquisition (containerd/go-cni#126)
• Support CNI STATUS Verb (containerd/go-cni#123)

Image Distribution

• Retry last registry host on 50x responses (#11484)
• Multipart layer fetch (#10177)
• Enable HTTP debug and trace for transfer based puller (#10762)
• Add support for unpacking custom media types (#11744)
• Add dial timeout field to hosts toml configuration (#11106)

Node Resource Interface (NRI)

• Expose Pod assigned IPs to NRI plugins (#10921)

Runtime

• Support multiple uid/gid mappings (#10722)
• Fix race between serve and immediate shutdown on the server (containerd/ttrpc#175)

Breaking

• Update FreeBSD defaults and re-organize platform defaults (#11017)

Deprecations

• Postpone cri config deprecations to v2.2 (#11684)
• Remove deprecated dynamic library plugins (#11683)
• Remove the support for Schema 1 images (#11681)

Please try out the release binaries and report any issues at
https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues.

Contributors

• Derek McGowan
• Phil Estes
• Akihiro Suda
• Maksym Pavlenko
• Jin Dong
• Wei Fu
• Sebastiaan van Stijn
• Samuel Karp
• Mike Brown
• Adrien Delorme
• Austin Vazquez
• Akhil Mohan
• Kazuyoshi Kato
• Henry Wang
• Gao Xiang
• ningmingxiao
• Krisztian Litkey
• Yang Yang
• Archit Kulkarni
• Chris Henzie
• Iceber Gu
• Alexey Lunev
• Antonio Ojea
• Davanum Srinivas
• Marat Radchenko
• Michael Zappa
• Paweł Gronowski
• Rodrigo Campos
• Alberto Garcia Hierro
• Amit Barve
• Andrey Smirnov
• Divya
• Etienne Champetier
• Kirtana Ashok
• Philip Laine
• QiPing Wan
• fengwei0328
• zounengren
• Adrian Reber
• Alfred Wingate
• Amal Thundiyil
• Athos Ribeiro
• Brian Goff
• Cesar Talledo
• ChengyuZhu6
• Chongyi Zheng
• Craig Ingram
• Danny Canter
• David Son
• Fupan Li
• HirazawaUi
• Jing Xu
• Jonathan A. Sternberg
• Jose Fernandez
• Kaita Nakamura
• Kohei Tokunaga
• Lei Liu
• Marco Visin
• Mike Baynton
• Qiyuan Liang
• Sameer
• Shiming Zhang
• Swagat Bora
• Teresaliu
• Tony Fang
• Tõnis Tiigi
• Vered Rosen
• Vinayak Goyal
• bo.jiang
• chriskery
• luchenhan
• mahmut
• zhaixiaojuan

Dependency Changes

• github.com/Microsoft/hcsshim v0.12.9 -> v0.13.0-rc.3
• github.com/cilium/ebpf v0.11.0 -> v0.16.0
• github.com/containerd/cgroups/v3 v3.0.3 -> v3.0.5
• github.com/containerd/containerd/api v1.8.0 -> v1.9.0
• github.com/containerd/continuity v0.4.4 -> v0.4.5
• github.com/containerd/go-cni v1.1.10 -> v1.1.12
• github.com/containerd/imgcrypt/v2 v2.0.0-rc.1 -> v2.0.1
• github.com/containerd/otelttrpc ea5083fda723 -> v0.1.0
• github.com/containerd/platforms v1.0.0-rc.0 -> v1.0.0-rc.1
• github.com/containerd/ttrpc v1.2.6 -> v1.2.7
• github.com/containerd/typeurl/v2 v2.2.2 -> v2.2.3
• github.com/containernetworking/cni v1.2.3 -> v1.3.0
• github.com/containernetworking/plugins v1.5.1 -> v1.7.1
• github.com/containers/ocicrypt v1.2.0 -> v1.2.1
• github.com/davecgh/go-spew d8f796af33cc -> v1.1.1
• github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify v1.7.0 -> v1.9.0
• github.com/go-jose/go-jose/v4 v4.0.4 -> v4.0.5
• github.com/google/go-cmp v0.6.0 -> v0.7.0
• github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/v2 v2.22.0 -> v2.26.1
• github.com/klauspost/compress v1.17.11 -> v1.18.0
• github.com/mdlayher/socket v0.4.1 -> v0.5.1
• github.com/moby/spdystream v0.4.0 -> v0.5.0
• github.com/moby/sys/user v0.3.0 -> v0.4.0
• github.com/opencontainers/image-spec v1.1.0 -> v1.1.1
• github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec v1.2.0 -> v1.2.1
• github.com/opencontainers/selinux v1.11.1 -> v1.12.0
• github.com/pelletier/go-toml/v2 v2.2.3 -> v2.2.4
• github.com/petermattis/goid 4fcff4a6cae7 new
• github.com/pmezard/go-difflib 5d4384ee4fb2 -> v1.0.0
• github.com/prometheus/client_golang v1.20.5 -> v1.22.0
• github.com/prometheus/common v0.55.0 -> v0.62.0
• github.com/sasha-s/go-deadlock v0.3.5 new
• github.com/smallstep/pkcs7 v0.1.1 new
• github.com/stretchr/testify v1.9.0 -> v1.10.0
• github.com/tchap/go-patricia/v2 v2.3.1 -> v2.3.2
• github.com/urfave/cli/v2 v2.27.5 -> v2.27.6
• github.com/vishvananda/netlink v1.3.0 -> 0e7078ed04c8
• github.com/vishvananda/netns v0.0.4 -> v0.0.5
• go.etcd.io/bbolt v1.3.11 -> v1.4.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/auto/sdk v1.1.0 new
• go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc v0.56.0 -> v0.60.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/net/http/otelhttp v0.56.0 -> v0.60.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace/otlptracegrpc v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace/otlptracehttp v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel/metric v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/otel/trace v1.31.0 -> v1.35.0
• go.opentelemetry.io/proto/otlp v1.3.1 -> v1.5.0
• golang.org/x/crypto v0.28.0 -> v0.36.0
• golang.org/x/exp aacd6d4b4611 -> 2d47ceb2692f
• golang.org/x/mod v0.21.0 -> v0.24.0
• golang.org/x/net v0.30.0 -> v0.38.0
• golang.org/x/oauth2 v0.22.0 -> v0.27.0
• golang.org/x/sync v0.8.0 -> v0.14.0
• golang.org/x/sys v0.26.0 -> v0.33.0
• golang.org/x/term v0.25.0 -> v0.30.0
• golang.org/x/text v0.19.0 -> v0.23.0
• golang.org/x/time v0.3.0 -> v0.7.0
• google.golang.org/genproto/googleapis/api 5fefd90f89a9 -> 56aae31c358a
• google.golang.org/genproto/googleapis/rpc 324edc3d5d38 -> 56aae31c358a
• google.golang.org/grpc v1.67.1 -> v1.72.0
• google.golang.org/protobuf v1.35.1 -> v1.36.6
• k8s.io/api v0.31.2 -> v0.32.3
• k8s.io/apimachinery v0.31.2 -> v0.32.3
• k8s.io/apiserver v0.31.2 -> v0.32.3
• k8s.io/client-go v0.31.2 -> v0.32.3
• k8s.io/cri-api v0.31.2 -> v0.32.3
• k8s.io/kubelet v0.31.2 -> v0.32.3
• k8s.io/utils 18e509b52bc8 -> 3ea5e8cea738
• sigs.k8s.io/json bc3834ca7abd -> 9aa6b5e7a4b3
• sigs.k8s.io/structured-merge-diff/v4 v4.4.1 -> v4.4.2
• tags.cncf.io/container-device-interface v0.8.0 -> v1.0.1
• tags.cncf.io/container-device-interface/specs-go v0.8.0 -> v1.0.0

Previous release can be found at v2.0.0

Which file should I download?

• containerd-<VERSION>-<OS>-<ARCH>.tar.gz: ✅Recommended. Dynamically linked with glibc 2.35 (Ubuntu 22.04).
• containerd-static-<VERSION>-<OS>-<ARCH>.tar.gz: Statically linked. Expected to be used on Linux distributions that do not use glibc >= 2.35. Not position-independent.

In addition to containerd, typically you will have to install runc
and CNI plugins from their official sites too.

See also the Getting Started documentation.