FreeBSD support

[paigeadelethompson]

I cant seem to figure out who cares about this. It matters a lot to me but I feel like I might be the only person. My question is is there some plant to make podman generally available for FreeBSD? Because I can't get it to work and as near as I can tell it's perhaps a problem with ocijail (maybe a version mismatch but I really can't imagine why that would be unless somebody is actually just using and developing ocijail, to be used on it's own. I could maybe contribute to this some but I need to understand a few things about how this is supposed to work. Ideally one wouldn't ever use Linux binary compatibility for anything because otherwise why not just use Linux but admittedly I want it to work and I don't want to have to figure out how to make it work for every new install of FreeBSD and in general running native FreeBSD containers with it would be ideal. Are you supposed to have runc or crun or something for Linux containers ? Because it's not installed and I'm wondering if that has something to with why it's not working.

[paigeadelethompson]

I tried bumping the ports version to 5.3.5 but still get the same error:

podman run --rm docker.io/dougrabson/hello
Trying to pull docker.io/dougrabson/hello:latest...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob b13a5ec7f3d2 done   |
Copying config f81c971736 done   |
Writing manifest to image destination
Error: OCI runtime error: ocijail: error calling jail_attach: Invalid argument

thats with ocijail 0.4.0 I DONT KNOW WHY, I asked freebsd-jails, freebsd-hackers, nobody knows .... I compiled podman from head and ran bin/podman and I get a different non-descript error:

podman/bin/podman run --rm docker.io/dougrabson/hello
Error: not supported

no logs.

[paigeadelethompson]

@dfr hey I just figured out that you're the maintainer for this port. Did this hit a wall? I'm at a loss for how to ascertain the cause of this error jail_attach: Invalid argument looking at the source for ocijail it seems there could only be one argument that it's unhappy with being the jail id: https://github.com/dfr/ocijail/blob/50ee0b899945b06e6295e7f1cfce26f0d2f37de5/ocijail/jail.cpp#L54

Happy to help here I'd really like to see this succeed, I'd appreciate the help though if this problem is more obvious to you ..

EDIT: Im looking at the man page for this https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=jail_attach I don't know what status that would be . I thought maybe I could use truss but that only shows calls in the current process and I think it must be running ocijail via exec or something so .. I dont know how to use ocijail really .... otherwise I'd test this and see if it does the same thing

[dfr]

I use both truss and ktrace for debugging these types of problem. With truss, I usually tell it to trace through forks and be verbose about execve calls using something like truss -faed. Sometimes truss gets confused and I drop down to ktrace -i and use kdump to examine the trace.

[afbjorklund]

Are you supposed to have runc or crun or something for Linux containers ?

There is "runj", which is an OCI runtime - supposed to work with the Linuxulator

https://samuel.karp.dev/blog/2021/03/runj-a-new-oci-runtime-for-freebsd-jails/

https://samuel.karp.dev/blog/2021/05/running-freebsd-jails-with-containerd-1-5/

For Podman, I would assume that it would rather use some variant of crun.

But I stopped experimenting 2023... (lima-vm/lima#1508) 👿

Both the VM images and the containers were pretty huge.

[afbjorklund]

This was the instructions that I was following at the time, ZFS was a pain

https://productionwithscissors.run/2022/09/04/containerd-linux-on-freebsd/

[afbjorklund]

It matters a lot to me but I feel like I might be the only person.

I don't think we ever found a valid use case for it (BSD), though

[paigeadelethompson]

It matters a lot to me but I feel like I might be the only person.

I don't think we ever found a valid use case for it (BSD), though

Yeah its not for everybody I suppose

[afbjorklund]

Regarding FreeBSD for podman machine, this was discussed here:

• Allow specifying a guest OS in podman machine init. #19939

[afbjorklund]

https://github.com/oci-playground/freebsd-podman-testing

https://podman.io/docs/installation#installing-on-freebsd-140

[afbjorklund]

This was the official update, as far as I know. "development will continue with planned further advancements throughout 2024"

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/advancing-cloud-native-containers-on-freebsd-podman-testing-highlights/ (dfr's ocijail)

[paigeadelethompson]

Yeah, I will try to get ahold of dfr and see if he'd be down to chat sometime thank you for that :) If I can manage to have a chat with him I'll definitely follow up because I want this to work, I'm not going back if I can go forward 😂

[rhatdan]

@dfr is the one working on this.

[dfr]

Sorry everyone. I haven't been paying attention here due to the seasonal family visits and festive TV etc.

To try to answer @paigeadelethompson 's question, I am the person who maintains the the FreeBSD Podman port. As I think you found, you can install this from the FreeBSD ports collection with something like 'pkg install podman' and this will install all the required support, including ocijail.

I'm not sure where your error is coming from - this is what I get with the latest port installed:

$ sudo podman run --rm docker.io/dougrabson/hello
Trying to pull docker.io/dougrabson/hello:latest...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob b13a5ec7f3d2 done   |
Copying config f81c971736 done   |
Writing manifest to image destination
!... Hello Podman World ...!

         .--"--.
       / -     - \
      / (O)   (O) \
   ~~~| -=(,Y,)=- |
    .---. /`  \   |~~
 ~/  o  o \~~~~.----. ~~
  | =(X)= |~  / (O (O) \
   ~~~~~~~  ~| =(Y_)=-  |
  ~~~~    ~~~|   U      |~~

Project:   https://github.com/containers/podman
Website:   https://podman.io
Documents: https://docs.podman.io
Twitter:   @Podman_io
$ sudo podman version
Client:       Podman Engine
Version:      5.2.5
API Version:  5.2.5
Go Version:   go1.21.13
Built:        Thu Jan  2 01:50:58 2025
OS/Arch:      freebsd/amd64

Lets try to chat sometime soon and try to solve your problem. For now, you should probably avoid Podman 5.3 - I think there are some. FreeBSD-only problems there that we need to debug before we can update the port.

[paigeadelethompson]

That would be cool, I was going to ask if maybe we could catch up on a jitsi call or something. I tried to reach out by e-mail but not sure if it reached you, I sent it from [email protected]?

[dfr]

That would be cool, I was going to ask if maybe we could catch up on a jitsi call or something. I tried to reach out by e-mail but not sure if it reached you, I sent it from [email protected]?

It did reach me - I'll reply there.