Debian Bookworm was released with Podman 4.3 and Linux kernel 6.1 so it should have decent rootless OverlayFS support . But somehow VFS was used by default running Podman rootless containers and this will have a huge impact on performance.
To switch such default away from VFS to OverlayFS, the easiest way is to install containers-storage
(which is just a suggested package for podman
, thus usually not considered as a dependency).
Steps#
First, backup your containers if necessary.
Reset storage back to initial state
podman system reset
then
sudo apt update
sudo apt install containers-storage
Under the Hood#
/usr/share/containers/storage.conf in the package
contains a line
that sets the default storage driver to OverlayFS.
Validation#
Run
podman info | grep graphDriverName
and the value should change from vfs to overlay.