With user namespaces you can get different uids inside the container. They are usually mapped to something above 65535, in blocks of 65535, according to /etc/su

With user namespaces you can get different uids inside the container. They are usually mapped to something above 65535, in blocks of 65535, according to /etc/subuid. When you run as rootless on podman with uid=1000, you end up at 66535, or 1000 above your start range in /etc/subuid, for example. This is what NFS/GPFS doesn’t like. Locally, in other file systems on the node, it’s fine. When you run as uid=0 in same the container, you are actually mapped to your uid, since the range starts to be applicable for uid=1. If you can stay as root, you can write to NFS/GPFS just fine. The issue with this is that lots of available containers have moved away from using things as root. For example, you couldn’t start the vanilla redis container with a data directory on NFS for snapshots because redis runs as user 999.