When to enable fuse-overlayfs

By default, the Universal Developer Image (UDI) contains Podman and Buildah which you can use to build and push container images within a workspace. However, Podman and Buildah in the UDI are configured to use the vfs storage driver which does not provide copy-on-write support. For more efficient image management, use the fuse-overlayfs storage driver which supports copy-on-write in rootless environments.

This page is for platform administrators who enable fuse-overlayfs cluster-wide, and for developers who want to enable it for individual workspaces. To learn more about common roles and example tasks, see Additional resources.

To enable fuse-overlayfs for workspaces for OpenShift versions older than 4.15, the administrator must first enable /dev/fuse access on the cluster. For details, see Additional resources.

This is not necessary for OpenShift versions 4.15 and later, since the /dev/fuse device is available by default.

After enabling /dev/fuse access, fuse-overlayfs can be enabled for all user workspaces within the cluster, or for workspaces belonging to certain users. For details on each approach, see Additional resources.