Kata Containers and Ubuntu Linux - lessons learned - 1/many

 This is the first of a few consecutive posts about my recent experiences with Kata Containers and Ubuntu, running on various platforms including my Mac ( via VMware Fusion 12 ).

I'm building up a list of "lessons learned" here, so that I can come back and find them when I need them ....

Firstly, having installed Kata 2.0 as the underlying container runtime for containerd  I was testing the container creation process on an Ubuntu 20.04 VM running under Fusion on my Mac ....

Problem 

sudo ctr run --rm --tty --runtime io.containerd.kata.v2 docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest ubuntu

returns: -

ctr: open /dev/vhost-vsock: no such device: unknown

Debugging with: -

sudo modprobe /dev/vhost-vsock

threw up: -

modprobe: FATAL: Module /dev/vhost-vsock not found in directory /lib/modules/5.4.0-73-generic

Solution

So the default VMware Tools equivalent ( open-vm-tools ) was getting in the way: -

Stop the Service

sudo service open-vm-tools stop

Unload the module that's grabbing vsock

sudo modprobe -r vmw_vsock_vmci_transport

Load the vhost_vsock module

sudo modprobe /dev/vhost-vsock

Job done

Alternative

Uninstall open-vm-tools

sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove open-vm-tools

More to follow ....