A race condition exists between the Kubelet cgroup manager and CRI-O. When a new pod is created, the cgroup manager receives an inotify event for the new cgroup path before the container is fully registered in CRI-O. Kubelet attempts to query the container status, receives a 404, and marks the pod as failed internally. This prevents all future synchronization for that pod.

    Customer Environment

1.Deploy a pod with multiple containers (e.g., NetApp Trident controller).

2. The issue occurs intermittently, often under high system load or when CNI setup takes >100ms.     

 Kubelet Logs: manager.go:1169: "Failed to process watch event... Status  404 returned error can't find the container".

Pod Status: Stuck in Pending / ContainerCreating.

Status Fields: imageID is empty and PodReadyToStartContainers is False, even though crictl ps shows the container is actually Running.

 Kubelet should implement a retry mechanism with exponential backoff when receiving a 404 error from the runtime during a cgroup watch event, allowing for the natural delay in CRI-O registration.