Rootless Podman on ZFS

Ugh. Today I had to spend 30 minutes figuring out how to get rootless podman to run on zfs.

The gist of it is to configure podman to use /usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs as its “mount_program”.

This is what I found on Reddit that worked out for me on Ubuntu 22.04 with ZFS disk encryption enabled

$ cat .config/containers/storage.conf 
[storage]
driver="overlay"

[storage.options.overlay]
mount_program = "/usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs"

Now, I don’t really mind having to do a bit of tinkering to get things running. But what I do mind is when I can’t easily find this in official documentation and wind up in (because I’m new to podman) complex discussions about drivers and filesystems that aren’t solving the issue.

My opinion is that (common) situations and setups like these should be covered in easy to find documentation/tutorials.

I hope this helps.

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