podman: Many podman commands simply print "cannot set user namespace"

Is this a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST? (leave only one on its own line)

/kind bug

Description

Earlier today I tried to build an existing Dockerfile but upgrading it to use Ubuntu 21.04 instead of 20.10. This failed rather quickly because of the glibc issue. Therefore I tried to upgrade podman from 2.2.1 to the 3.1.x version available through the Kubic project (I am on Centos8). This sadly did not fix the issue.

Since I wasn’t able to build 21.04 I reverted back to 20.10 and rebuilt the image. While doing that the WSL2 instance this is all running in filled up all available hard disk space, which actually crashed the instance. To fix this I cleared out all images build with podman and buildah to recover ~30 GBs of disk space. Afterward I shrunk the image with a guide.

I used the following commands to clear all images:

podman system prune
podman system prune --all
podman system prune --all --force
podman rmi $(podman images -qa)
podman rmi --force
buildah rm --all

Now after clearing out all images and resizing the disk I am no longer able to use podman as most commands simply print:

> podman version
cannot set user namespace

I searched the internet for this string and I cannot find anything. Do you have any clue how to fix this? I already tried reinstalling the old version of podman but I cannot use it productively anymore.

Output of podman version:

> podman version
cannot set user namespace
> sudo podman version
Version:      2.2.1
API Version:  2
Go Version:   go1.14.12
Built:        Mon Feb 22 05:51:35 2021
OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

Output of podman info --debug:

❯ podman info --debug
cannot set user namespace

Package info (e.g. output of rpm -q podman or apt list podman):

❯ rpm -q podman
podman-2.2.1-7.module_el8.3.0+699+d61d9c41.x86_64

Have you tested with the latest version of Podman and have you checked the Podman Troubleshooting Guide?

Yes

Additional environment details (AWS, VirtualBox, physical, etc.):

• WSL2
• CentOS Linux release 8.3.2011