Kata Containers: Diagnosing ’Container Not Started’ Errors

When eBPF-based security profiles silently block syscalls in a Kata Containers runtime, tracking down 'container not started' errors requires knowing exactly where to look.

You'll learn:

• How Kata Containers' nested virtualization layer changes where failures actually surface versus standard runc
• Why eBPF security profiles (Seccomp, BPF-LSM) can silently drop syscalls that the guest kernel needs at startup
• Using dmesg, kata-runtime logs, and bpftool prog tracelog to correlate guest-side panics with host-side policy denials
• Common gotchas: mismatched kernel versions between host and guest image causing profile incompatibilities
• How to audit and iterate on allow-lists without disabling your security profile entirely

Keywords: Kata Containers debugging, eBPF security profiles, container runtime errors, Seccomp troubleshooting, SRE interview prep

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