Enabling fuse-overlayfs for all workspaces

Prerequisites

The Enabling container access to /dev/fuse for OpenShift older than 4.15 section has been completed. This is not required for OpenShift versions 4.15 and later.
An active kubectl session with administrative permissions to the destination OpenShift cluster. See Overview of kubectl.

Procedure

Set the necessary annotation in the spec.devEnvironments.workspacesPodAnnotations field of the CheCluster custom resource.

kind: CheCluster
apiVersion: org.eclipse.che/v2
spec:
  devEnvironments:
    workspacesPodAnnotations:
      io.kubernetes.cri-o.Devices: /dev/fuse

For OpenShift versions before 4.15, the io.openshift.podman-fuse: "" annotation is also required.

The Universal Development Image (UDI) includes the following logic in the entrypoint script to detect fuse-overlayfs and set the storage driver. If you use a custom image, you should add an equivalent logic the image’s entrypoint.

if [ ! -d "${HOME}/.config/containers" ]; then
  mkdir -p ${HOME}/.config/containers
  if [ -c "/dev/fuse" ] && [ -f "/usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs" ]; then
    (echo '[storage]';echo 'driver = "overlay"';echo '[storage.options.overlay]';echo 'mount_program = "/usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs"') > ${HOME}/.config/containers/storage.conf
  else
    (echo '[storage]';echo 'driver = "vfs"') > "${HOME}"/.config/containers/storage.conf
  fi
fi

Verification steps

Start a workspace and verify that the storage driver is overlay.

$ podman info | grep overlay

Example output:

graphDriverName: overlay
  overlay.mount_program:
    Executable: /usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs
    Package: fuse-overlayfs-1.12-1.module+el8.9.0+20326+387084d0.x86_64
      fuse-overlayfs: version 1.12
  Backing Filesystem: overlayfs

The following error might occur for existing workspaces:

ERRO[0000] User-selected graph driver "overlay" overwritten by graph driver "vfs" from database - delete libpod local files ("/home/user/.local/share/containers/storage") to resolve.  May prevent use of images created by other tools

In this case, delete the libpod local files as mentioned in the error message.