After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message:
Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125
Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue:
We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong:
>podman info
OS: windows/amd64
provider: wsl
version: 5.3.1
Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM
Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM:
>podman machine list
NAME VM TYPE CREATED LAST UP CPUS MEMORY DISK SIZE
podman-machine-default wsl 6 months ago 4 days ago 2 2GiB 100GiB
The machine is still there so that is good news. Let’s try to restart it:
>podman machine stop
Machine "podman-machine-default" stopped successfully
>podman machine start
Starting machine "podman-machine-default"
The operation timed out because a response was not received from the virtual machine or container.
Error code: Wsl/Service/CreateInstance/CreateVm/HCS_E_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT
Error: the WSL bootstrap script failed: command C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\wsl.exe [-u root -d podman-machine-default /root/bootstrap] failed: exit status 0xffffffff
Looks like something is wrong with the VM. Lets remove it:
>podman machine rm podman-machine-default
The following files will be deleted:
C:\Users\<user>\.config\containers\podman\machine\wsl\podman-machine-default.json
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\podman\podman-machine-default.sock
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\podman\podman-machine-default-gvproxy.sock
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\podman\podman-machine-default-api.sock
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\podman\podman-machine-default.log
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y
Logging out.
The operation has completed.
Once the VM is removed, we can try to recreate it:
>podman machine init
Looking up Podman Machine image at quay.io/podman/machine-os-wsl:5.3 to create VM
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 54c816116e80 done |
Copying config 44136fa355 done |
Writing manifest to image destination
54c816116e80d74b8e638baf1fb37f3d6c4b6545f8c405d998169513766e1dc5
Extracting compressed file: podman-machine-default-amd64: done
Importing operating system into WSL (this may take a few minutes on a new WSL install)...
Importeren wordt uitgevoerd. Dit kan enkele minuten duren.
The operation timed out because a response was not received from the virtual machine or container.
Error code: Wsl/Service/RegisterDistro/CreateVm/HCS_E_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT
Error: the WSL import of guest OS failed: command C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\wsl.exe [--import podman-machine-default C:\Users\<user>\.local\share\containers\podman\machine\wsl\wsldist\podman-machine-default C:\Users\<user>\.local\share\containers\podman\machine\wsl\podman-machine-default-amd64 --version 2] failed: exit status 0xffffffff
Still no luck! But what do you do if everything else failed…
A reboot!
We rebooted the machine and indeed the error magically disappeared.
On to the next issue…
More information
Podman 5.3.1 - Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: open \.ssh\known_hosts:
Podman Desktop–The WSL import of guest OS failed: exit status 0xffffffff