Bug#987207: podman not running out-of-the-box as root

[Reinhard Tartler]

Control: tag -1 moreinfo

Hi Laurent,

I've downloaded the Bullseye Alpha 3 debian installer and installed using kvm to have a super clean new system. Unfortunately, I was unable to reproduce the issue that you described below. (I did find some issues with rootless podman outside of a gnome-session, but that's a different story).

The symptoms sound a lot like described in this upstream bug: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/5721

Can you please compare your notes with that upstream bug? Can you confirm that the 'overlay' kernel module is loaded? (in my test, it was loaded automatically). If you still think this is an issue in the Debian package, please let me know. I may require your assistance with reproducing this issue.

-rt

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 11:54 AM Laurent Bigonville <bi...@debian.org> wrote:

Package: podman
Version: 3.0.1+dfsg1-1
Severity: serious

Hello,

After installing podman, I cannot run it as root out of the box as it
fails with:

ERRO[0000] [graphdriver] prior storage driver overlay failed: kernel does not support overlay fs: 'overlay' is not supported over extfs at "/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay": backing file system is unsupported for this graph driver
Error: kernel does not support overlay fs: 'overlay' is not supported over extfs at "/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay": backing file system is unsupported for this graph driver

Looking at fedora it seems that they have a containers-common package
that ships a default storage.conf file:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/containers-common/blob/rawhide/f/storage.conf

I see that the debian package is shipping a file in
/usr/share/containers/storage.conf (in the containers-storage package),
but that file is apparently not read (strace only shows that the file in
/etc/containers is read) and anyway unlike in fedora:

1) the driver is not set to overlay
2) the file is installed only if the containers-storage package is
installed, which is not done by default.
3) that file is not read anyway, strace only shows that
/etc/containers/storage.conf is read and not
/usr/share/containers/storage.conf, so the file is apparently useless

Shouldn't debian do the same thing than fedora so everything works OOTB?

As a side note, I can see they are shipping also other files as well,
like the seccomp.json file, using strace, it seems that podman tries to
read them:

[pid 14835] newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/containers/seccomp.json", 0xc0000ee6b8, 0) = -1 ENOENT (Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type)
[pid 14835] newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/containers/seccomp.json", 0xc0000ee788, 0) = -1 ENOENT (Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type)

Shouldn't that file be shipped by default too?

Kind regards,
Laurent Bigonville

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.0
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_BE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=fr_BE:fr
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: SELinux: enabled - Mode: Permissive - Policy name: refpolicy

Versions of packages podman depends on:
ii  conmon                           2.0.25+ds1-1
ii  containernetworking-plugins      0.9.0-1+b3
ii  golang-github-containers-common  0.35.4+ds1-1
ii  init-system-helpers              1.60
ii  libc6                            2.31-11
ii  libdevmapper1.02.1               2:1.02.175-2.1
ii  libgpgme11                       1.14.0-1+b2
ii  libseccomp2                      2.5.1-1
ii  runc                             1.0.0~rc93+ds1-3

Versions of packages podman recommends:
ii  buildah                                           1.20.0+ds1-1
ii  fuse-overlayfs                                    1.4.0-1
ii  golang-github-containernetworking-plugin-dnsname  1.1.1+ds1-4+b4
ii  slirp4netns                                       1.0.1-2
ii  tini                                              0.19.0-1
ii  uidmap                                            1:4.8.1-1

Versions of packages podman suggests:
ii  containers-storage  1.24.8+dfsg1-1+b1
ii  docker-compose      1.25.0-1

-- no debconf information

--

regards,
    Reinhard

[Laurent Bigonville]

Hello,

I just did a minimal test VM and... it indeed works...

I'll investigate why on my machine it's not working.

But, on the test VM, podman still fails because "iptables" is not installed, only "nft" is intalled by default now. So there is still a problem here.

Le 21/04/21 à 05:02, Reinhard Tartler a écrit :

[Reinhard Tartler]

Control: tag -1 pending

Control: severity -1 important

Control: retitle -1 Missing dependency on "iptables"

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 6:07 AM Laurent Bigonville <bi...@debian.org> wrote:

So the problem here is, again, linked to the fact that I'm using a test SELinux policy that doesn't contain all the needed contexts, so yeah it's a mix of configuration issue and the fact that podman is not ignoring these errors if SELinux is in permissive. I'll ping upstream again.

Thanks, let's track this in #984879

So the remaining problem here is iptables command not being installed (and the seccomp.json file missing to a lower extend)

Agreed.

--

regards,
    Reinhard