Multipass: “Instance stopped while starting”

0xksure
2 min readMay 26, 2023

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Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

So I wanted experiment with microk8s on my local mac as docker desktop k8s refused to start. Plus, I really want to run microk8s on a rpi at some point.

Unfortunately, microk8s install failed with

Instance stopped while starting

What…does that mean? I’m not by any means a core anything really. I noticed however that since microk8s are running on linux and specifically on some ubuntu distro. So I guess that’s where the error came from.

Yes, multipass failed to create an instance and return “Instance stopped while starting”.

The weird thing is that when I ran `multipass list` I got that my instance were starting but never running. I tried over and over running the command

multipass start -vvvv

Suddenly, I found an error saying something along the lines of

started: qemu-img info /var/root/Library/Caches/multipassd/vault/images/jammy-20230518/ubuntu-22.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.img

Interesting. Or, I have no clue what qemu is and why it wouldn’t work considering the img is in a multipassd folder.

Oh well, after a bit of searching I found this issue

And it seems like you can change the driver to qemu. So this line basically fixed it

multipass set local.driver=qemu

Given you have installed qemu.

Then by running

microk8s install  
multipass list

I got

Now where were I?

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