Lack of podman-pause infra image causes error after host reboot for rootless pod (or am I doing it wrong?)

[danieljrmay]

Hello,

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere but I have not been able to find anything…

I have a problem where my rootless pod will not start up after I reboot my host system:

On a fresh Fedora 42 installation running podman 5.5.0:

$ uname -a
Linux fedora 6.14.9-300.fc42.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu May 29 14:27:53 UTC 2025 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
⋮
Nothing to do.
$ podman --version
podman version 5.5.0

I will illustrate the "bare-bones" of the issue with an empty pod, but I have the same problem when my pod includes "real" containers:

$ podman pod create myemptypod
749dc6c39bb060ddd856c5770f182b562b83e7cf8dd5671ed92e4f0c34c40011
$ podman pod start myemptypod
myemptypod
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME        STATUS      CREATED         INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod  Running     32 seconds ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1
$ podman ps --all
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE       COMMAND     CREATED         STATUS         PORTS       NAMES
cf0e3ea70b73                          37 seconds ago  Up 23 seconds              749dc6c39bb0-infra

I am able to stop and start the pod without an issue:

$ podman pod stop myemptypod 
myemptypod
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME        STATUS      CREATED        INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod  Exited      3 minutes ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1
$ podman ps --all
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE       COMMAND     CREATED        STATUS                     PORTS       NAMES
cf0e3ea70b73                          4 minutes ago  Exited (0) 18 seconds ago              749dc6c39bb0-infra
$ podman pod start myemptypod
myemptypod
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME        STATUS      CREATED        INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod  Running     4 minutes ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1
$ podman ps --all
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE       COMMAND     CREATED        STATUS         PORTS       NAMES
cf0e3ea70b73                          4 minutes ago  Up 11 seconds              749dc6c39bb0-infra

However when I reboot and try to start the pod it reports an error:

$ sudo reboot
⋮
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME        STATUS      CREATED        INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod  Exited      8 minutes ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1
$ podman pod start myemptypod 
Error: starting container cf0e3ea70b737e9554ddc4f6db90c83273bafe7739c68607077aa1ada1d11a39: rootfs-overlay: creating overlay failed "/run/user/1000/libpod/tmp/infra-container": stat /run/user/1000/libpod/tmp/infra-container: no such file or directory

This seems to be related to the removal of the podman-pause infra image #25789 which happened in podman 5.5.0 as I can get around it by specifying my own infra image with:

$ podman pull k8s.gcr.io/pause
⋮
$ podman pod create --infra-image k8s.gcr.io/pause myinfraimagepod
064e30556783cd544e3baed9e23209d1c5c1b584dbbe2e39b4ba318e0222cd71
$ podman pod start myinfraimagepod 
myinfraimagepod
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME             STATUS      CREATED         INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
064e30556783  myinfraimagepod  Running     27 seconds ago  20983101fd91  1
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod       Exited      19 minutes ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1
$ podman ps --all
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                    COMMAND     CREATED         STATUS                     PORTS       NAMES
cf0e3ea70b73                                       20 minutes ago  Exited (0) 12 minutes ago              749dc6c39bb0-infra
20983101fd91  k8s.gcr.io/pause:latest              38 seconds ago  Up 19 seconds                          064e30556783-infra
$ sudo reboot
⋮
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME             STATUS      CREATED         INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
064e30556783  myinfraimagepod  Exited      3 minutes ago   20983101fd91  1
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod       Exited      23 minutes ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1
$ podman pod start myinfraimagepod 
myinfraimagepod
$ podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME             STATUS      CREATED         INFRA ID      # OF CONTAINERS
064e30556783  myinfraimagepod  Running     4 minutes ago   20983101fd91  1
749dc6c39bb0  myemptypod       Exited      23 minutes ago  cf0e3ea70b73  1

However, this feels like I'm "doing it wrong" 😕

Any advice on this would be much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Dan

[Luap99]

you need to update to 5.5.1, that was a regression #26190

[danieljrmay]

Thank you!