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Active Development · v2.4.x v2.4.13

Cardinal

Flagship Project: Lightweight Daemonless Container Runtime

A static ~5 MB binary in Go that runs OCI containers directly via Linux namespaces (PID, Mount, Net, UTS, IPC), cgroups v2, and OverlayFS with zero background daemon overhead.

Source Code on GitHub

Project Overview

Cardinal addresses the challenge of running isolated Linux workloads without the memory and process overhead of persistent background daemons. Unlike traditional container platforms that rely on a continuous daemon, Cardinal spawns container processes and releases host overhead.

The runtime natively supports pulling and extracting OCI images from container registries, bridge and host networking, dynamic port mapping without container restarts (cardinal port add/rm), real-time cgroups v2 resource metrics (cardinal stats), Unix-socket attachments (cardinal attach), and cluster orchestration.

Distributed via native .deb, .rpm, .apk, .snap packages, self-contained AppImage bundles, and raw static binaries.

Architecture & Integration

Pure CLI runtime in Go. Direct Linux kernel interaction via unshare, nsenter, cgroups v2, and Netlink. Dedicated `cardinal serve` mode provides an HTTP API for external management daemons.

Quick Invocation: 
cardinal run -d -n web -p 8081:80 nginx:alpine
cardinal stats web
cardinal port add web 9000:9000

Capabilities & Status

Daemonless ArchitectureImplemented

Zero resident background processes between command invocations

~5 MB Static BinaryImplemented

Self-contained binary with zero external dynamic library dependencies

OCI Image CompatibilityImplemented

Direct layer pull and extraction from Docker Hub and compliant OCI registries

Dynamic Port ForwardingImplemented

Live addition and removal of host port mappings without stopping containers

Live cgroups v2 MetricsImplemented

Streaming real-time CPU, RAM, I/O, and PID metrics from cgroup v2 controllers

Cluster Orchestration & FaaSImplemented

Multi-node workload dispatch and serverless function primitives via internal orchestrator

Technologies & Primitives:
GoLinux Namespacescgroups v2OverlayFSiptablesOCI SpecificationUnix Sockets
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