[3067083474] Upstream Reporter: Charlie Hills
Upstream issue status: Closed
Upstream description:

On macos podman load seems much slower than it should be. sshing to the podman machine and running the load from there is much faster. For example, podman load on a tensorflow image took 4.75 minutes while podman machine ssh -- podman load took 30 seconds on my machine.

Reproduction steps:

podman pull tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu
podman save tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu -o tensorflow.tar
podman image rm tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu
time podman load -i tensorflow.tar                                       # takes 4 minutes
podman image rm tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu
time podman machine ssh -- podman load -i $(realpath tensorflow.tar)     # takes 30 seconds

Environment (rootful vs rootless doesn't seem to make a difference):

~ $ podman machine info
host:
    arch: arm64
    currentmachine: podman-machine-default
    defaultmachine: ""
    eventsdir: /var/folders/tr/bx7bxwwd1fx373hqgjrz4d980000gn/T/storage-run-501/podman
    machineconfigdir: /Users/chills/.config/containers/podman/machine/applehv
    machineimagedir: /Users/chills/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/applehv
    machinestate: Running
    numberofmachines: 1
    os: darwin
    vmtype: applehv
version:
    apiversion: 5.4.1
    version: 5.4.1
    goversion: go1.24.1
    gitcommit: b79bc8afe796cba51dd906270a7e1056ccdfcf9e
    builttime: Tue Mar 11 11:37:40 2025
    built: 1741718260
    buildorigin: pkginstaller
    osarch: darwin/arm64
    os: darwin

~ $ podman machine inspect
[
     {
          "ConfigDir": {
               "Path": "/Users/chills/.config/containers/podman/machine/applehv"
          },
          "ConnectionInfo": {
               "PodmanSocket": {
                    "Path": "/var/folders/tr/bx7bxwwd1fx373hqgjrz4d980000gn/T/podman/podman-machine-default-api.sock"
               },
               "PodmanPipe": null
          },
          "Created": "2025-05-14T15:39:12.161613-07:00",
          "LastUp": "2025-05-15T11:05:04.838064-07:00",
          "Name": "podman-machine-default",
          "Resources": {
               "CPUs": 5,
               "DiskSize": 100,
               "Memory": 2048,
               "USBs": []
          },
          "SSHConfig": {
               "IdentityPath": "/Users/chills/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/machine",
               "Port": 52429,
               "RemoteUsername": "core"
          },
          "State": "running",
          "UserModeNetworking": true,
          "Rootful": true,
          "Rosetta": true
     }
]