[Package Request] - fuse-overlayfs and squashfuse

[liningpan]

What package is missing from Amazon Linux 2023? Please describe and include package name.

• fuse-overlayfs: https://github.com/containers/fuse-overlayfs
• squashfuse: https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse

Is this an update to existing package or new package request?

This is a new package request.

Is this package available in Amazon Linux 2? If it is available via external sources such as EPEL, please specify.

I believe these packages are available in official EPEL, but not EPEL for Amazon Linux 2.

Any additional information you'd like to include. (use-cases, etc)

These packages are used by Apptainer (previously known as Singularity), which is a very common container solution for HPC applications. These missing packages prevents us from using Amazon Linux for HPC workloads.

[liningpan]

Previously, I also tested Apptainer on Amazon Linux 2, and experienced similar issues. https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/issues/1150

[dirkpetersen]

same here cannot install apptainer:

[root@fro ~]# dnf install -y https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/releases/download/v1.2.4/apptainer-1.2.4-1.x86_64.rpm
Last metadata expiration check: 1:03:20 ago on Tue Oct 24 13:50:34 2023.
apptainer-1.2.4-1.x86_64.rpm                                              31 MB/s |  38 MB     00:01
Error:
 Problem: conflicting requests
  - nothing provides fuse-overlayfs needed by apptainer-1.2.4-1.x86_64
  - nothing provides squashfuse needed by apptainer-1.2.4-1.x86_64

[ozbenh]

For overlayfs at least, the kernel supports rootless use of the kernel-side overlayfs which us MUCH preferable (and faster) than the fuse variant. Apptainer hasn't been updated to take advantage of this yet ? From a quick google it seems like it does but the Fedora package still has a dependency on fuse-overlayfs .. ugh.

[jaltman]

Isn't the reason that fuse-overlayfs is used because it handles the processing of AUFS .wh. whiteout file and opaque directory encoding? The in-kernel overlayfs does not.