Hi Reinhard,
I've now worked on packaging 4.6.2, and it is currently available
in debian/experimental. Can you do me a favor? Please test it and let me
know whether
it fixes this issue.
Thanks, it looks very promising!
On a system without any storage.conf files, but with existing vfs
container storage, podman kept using the vfs driver. Trying to force the
overlay driver with --storage-driver overlay resulted in an error, as
expected.
After removing ~.local/share/containers it started using the overlay
driver automatically. Trying to force vfs resulted in an error, also as
expected.
I think this is very sensible behavior and a news message may not even
be required. On the other hand, existing vfs users would miss out on the
advantages of overlay storage. Since migration is not trivial, it might
be helpful to include migration instructions.
I'm happy to add a note in NEWS.Debian, which is going to be presented
on package upgrades. Can you please provide a wording for that text that you
would have been useful to you?
How about this?
----
Podman 4.6 changes the default storage driver from vfs to overlay.
The overlay driver has been available for some time, but it had to be
enabled explicitly in the Debian version of podman. The overlay driver
is generally much faster and uses less disk space than the vfs driver.
.
To take advantage of overlay, it's necessary to delete local container
storage. Make sure to save or export any images, containers and volumes
before doing so, or you will lose them!
.
Some helpful commands:
.
# save the filesystem of a container
podman export -o important-container.tar important_container
# save a volume
podman volume export -o important-volume.tar important_volume
# save all container images
podman save -o images.tar
# delete ~/.local/share/containers
# check that podman is using the overlay driver
podman info | grep graphDriverName
# re-import all container images
podman load -i images.tar
# re-import a saved container filesystem as a container image
podman import important-container.tar
# re-import a volume
podman volume import important_volume important-volume.tar
----
Maybe some web links could be helpful. I haven't found anything complete
though.
