Is native overlay available in rootless mode?
When I run podman as root there's no problem, overlayfs is picked up
as default in debian. VFS is selected as default only in rootless mode.

Rgrds,

On 25.01.2023 14:03, Giuseppe Scrivano wrote:

Reinhard Tartler <siretart@gmail.com> writes:

On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 2:08 PM Daniel Walsh <dwalsh@redhat.com> wrote:

 On 1/24/23 03:47, Reinhard Tartler wrote:

 Dan,

 In Debian, I've chosen to just go with the upstream defaults:
 https://github.com/containers/storage/blob/8428fad6d0d3c4cded8fd7702af36a09f02b858f/storage.conf#L116-L118

 This file is installed verbatim to /usr/share/containers/storage.conf.

 Is there a better choice? Does Fedora/Redhat provide a default storage.conf from somewhere else?

 Thanks,
 -rt

 That should be fine.  Fedora goes with that default as well. Does debian support rootless overlay by default?

 If not then it would fail over to VFS if fuse-overlayfs is not installed.

I'm a bit confused about what you mean with that.

In Debian releases that ship podman 4.x we have at least Linux kernel 6.0. The fuse-overlayfs package is installed by default, but users may opt to not
install it by configuring apt to not install "Recommends" by default.

What else is required for rootless overlay?

Also, if I follow this conversation, then it appears that the default storage.conf requires modification in line 118 (to uncomment the mount_program
option) in order to actually use fuse-overlayfs. I would have expected podman to use fuse-overlayfs if it happens to be installed, and fallback to direct
mount if not. I read Michail's email thread that this appears to be not the case and he had to spend a lot of effort figuring out how to install an
appropriate configuration file. Maybe I'm missing something, but I wonder what we can do to improve the user experience?

what issue do you see if you use native overlay?

Podman prefers native overlay if it is available, since it is faster.
If not, it tries fuse-overlays and if it is not available, it falls back
to vfs.

Could you try from a fresh storage though?  If fuse-overlayfs was
already used, then Podman will continue using it even if native overlay
is available, since the storage metadata is slightly different.

Thanks,
Giuseppe
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