You do need an suid binary to e.g. set a new user id map, since this requires comparing the user id range owned by you to what you're mapping, but you only do it once and it's a simple, secure operation.

I don't think it is misleading. Just because you need root privileges to enable "rootless" doesn't mean it isn't rootless once configured.

It's somewhere in between. You definitely need to enable features that are normally out-of-reach of regular users (i.e. user namespaces, network namespace, unprivileged ping, etc.) However it's still a far cry from full root access, and arguably a smaller surface area than regular run-everything-as-root mode.

> podman either relies on suid binaries

I'm fairly sure this is only the case on older systems, if your system is up to date then podman should not rely on suid binaries.

Maybe you should include this into your "research":

- https://opensource.com/article/19/2/how-does-rootless-podman...

- https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...

TL;DR

cgroup V2 support

Installing Podman

Install slirp4netns

Ensure fuse-overlayfs is installed

you can run containers without root, suid bits or special capabilities with podman.

of course, withouth any of that your containers will be able to do very little (eg: no networking).

Slirp networking does not need any suid bit or special capability.