Mac M1 use of podman

[bobwolff68]

New to podman - using a Macbook Air M1 machine as I understand podman supports this now - great! But my experience is that I cannot get podman machine start to work. It's unclear to me if I can only use a subset of machine types due to the x86/arm64 divide or what, but the general instructions didn't show me much love - see below. Any thoughts?

➜ ~ podman --version
podman version 3.4.4
➜ ~ podman machine list
NAME VM TYPE CREATED LAST UP CPUS MEMORY DISK SIZE
podman-machine-default* qemu 28 hours ago 28 hours ago 1 2.147GB 10.74GB
➜ ~ podman machine start
INFO[0000] waiting for clients...
INFO[0000] listening tcp://127.0.0.1:7777
INFO[0000] new connection from to /var/folders/b2/nchtpdq54n7fbjmwkjw1c6xh0000gp/T/podman/qemu_podman-machine-default.sock
Waiting for VM ...
qemu-system-x86_64: Unknown Error
Error: dial unix /var/folders/b2/nchtpdq54n7fbjmwkjw1c6xh0000gp/T/podman/podman-machine-default_ready.sock: connect: connection refused
ERRO[0003] cannot receive packets from , disconnecting: cannot read size from socket: EOF
ERRO[0003] cannot read size from socket: EOF

[afbjorklund]

It seems like you used the wrong binary for podman-remote, if podman is amd64 then it will also try to emulate an amd64 VM. (oops)

Can you make sure that your podman binary is arm64 ? Then it should be running qemu-system-aarch64, not qemu-system-x86_64.

You also want to install the qemu-user-static binaries, so that you can run containers from the other architecture - once the VM is up.

• Podman can't run command on M1 with container built on X86 #12144

[bobwolff68]

Thanks for the reply and insight!

I think my output above confirms that it is running qemu-system-x86_64 given the : Unknown Error.

I'm happy to install the qemu-user-static binaries, etc, but the referenced issue 12144 doesn't make that clear to me. Can you help me get clear on what to do?

And is there something that I did incorrectly in installation? podman says it supports M1 so it seems I shouldn't have to be using a crowbar to get it rolling. :)

[afbjorklund]

Homebrew installs in /opt/homebrew for arm64, and /usr/local for amd64.
(On the Mac that is, it installs in /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew on Linux...)

See https://docs.brew.sh/Installation

To enable running amd64 containers, in an arm64 virtual machine (e.g. M1):
(Native containers, or multi-arch, work out-of-the-box, this was for emulation)

podman machine ssh sudo rpm-ostree install qemu-user-static
podman machine ssh sudo systemctl reboot

[baude]

there is some cases where is brew was being run with rosettta, the arch is being set to x86_64. This is not a Podman thing. I think some people has success uninstalling and re-installed brew.

[afbjorklund]

Well, it's a bug that podman machine doesn't work in emulation - on the other hand, that's normally not what the user wants anyway.

• podman machine init Support emulating different architectures #11458

But should be able to do better than "Unknown Error", no ?

• Can't start machine on M1 #13010