On Fri, Jul 10, 2026 at 11:20:37AM -0700, Pierrick Bouvier wrote: > On 7/10/2026 4:52 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 10, 2026 at 12:47:28PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote: > >> Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> writes: > >> > >> (added Edgar for Microblaze) > >> > >>> On Thu, Jul 09, 2026 at 09:24:12AM -0700, Pierrick Bouvier wrote: > >>>> On 7/9/2026 9:13 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > >>>>> On Thu, Jul 09, 2026 at 07:48:14AM -0700, Pierrick Bouvier wrote: > >>>>>> On 2/10/2026 8:35 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > >>>>>>> When a developer's environment is already within a podman container it > >>>>>>> is not possible to use 'podman' again to create containers. It will > >>>>>>> usually result in wierd errors such as: > >>>>>>> > >>>>>>> Error: fatal error, invalid internal status, unable to create a new > >>>>>>> pause process: cannot re-exec process to join the existing user > >>>>>>> namespace. Try running "podman system migrate" and if that doesn't > >>>>>>> work reboot to recover > >>>>>>> > >>>>>>> Podman offers the ability to talk to a daemon outside the container, > >>>>>>> however, which could be leveraged by QEMU. > >>>>>>> > >> <snip> > >>>>>> Taking a look at why tcg tests are slow to compile, I reached this > >>>>>> commit. It seems like that calling 'podman info' is 5 to 10 times > >>>>>> slower > >>>>>> than calling 'podman version'. > >>>>>> Thus, a container run now takes +1s when it was 0.2 before. > >>>>> > >>>>> Hmmm, but we call 'docker.py probe' in configure and cache the result, > >>>>> so that probe should only be done once. 0.2 vs 1s is just noise in > >>>>> the context of configure. > >>>>> > >>>>> That you're seeing any negative effects suggests that we've got > >>>>> something not using the cached probe result, which we should fix. > >>>>> > >>>> > >>>> Not really, docker.py --engine X still calls X info. > >>>> > >>>> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/blob/master/tests/docker/docker.py#L675 > >>>> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/blob/master/tests/docker/docker.py#L78 > >>>> > >>>> Maybe the fix is to remove the check if user specified an explicit > >>>> engine. But in this case, there is a problem with podman-remote not > >>>> being detected anymore. > >>>> > >>>> We can fix this by introducing engine=podman-remote, and skip the check > >>>> if engine is explicitly set. > >>>> What do you think? > >>> > >>> Urgh, so i see now we have two code paths / make variables > >>> > >>> RUNC=podman --remote > >>> CONTAINER_ENGINE=auto > >>> > >>> Sometimes we'll invoke docker.py --engine $(CONTAINER_ENGINE) > >>> and sometimes we'll directly invoke $(RUNC). > >> > >> Yeah that could do with cleaning up. I suspect the only places we > >> actually still need the script is where we are doing binfmt_misc enabled > >> containers unless there is a way to emulate the copying of qemu into the > >> container with a plain call? Maybe all the systems now have the > >> persistent flags which would skip this. > > > > Yeah, I'd be inclined to say this is a job for the distros to have > > qemu-user integration, and simplify our life. THe docker.py script > > always confuses me. We could choose podman vs podman --remote vs > > docker simply in the meson.build file, as we do for other dev env > > choices. > > > >> The toolchain case could be skipped if we could find hosted compilers > >> for microblaze. However I do see we have a patch in there. > >> > >>> > >>> The result of "probe" cannot be fed back in to "--engine" which > >>> is a bit of a mess. I think the "engine" concept should not be > >>> exposed on the cli, and instead have a "--runc" arg which takes > >>> the full arg(s), since we need probe to report the runc args > >>> for other reasons. > >>> > >>> With regards, > >>> Daniel > >> > >> -- > >> Alex Bennée > >> Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro > >> > > > > With regards, > > Daniel > > Is it me or did we incredibly derailed from original issue which was: > "It was fast to query which container engine is available, and now it's > 5-10 times slower to accommodate toolbox workflow where podman is > available but not really available?" > I agree it's sad to have several ways to set container engine, but it's > absolutely not related to the current issue.
It is relevant because that difference in speed is not something that should be noticable unless something is repeatedly probing over & over again which should not be done. > Daniel, since you introduced the slow check path with podman info for > your personal need, I would appreciate if it's something you could fix also. I'll looking into the missing caching. With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com ~~ https://hachyderm.io/@berrange :| |: https://libvirt.org ~~ https://entangle-photo.org :| |: https://pixelfed.art/berrange ~~ https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
