Home dir not mounting anymore with 1.2.1 when local username is not a valid Linux username

[pmalek]

Description

I've tried recreating my local VM with lima 1.2.1 (using https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/bookworm/20250804-2194/debian-12-genericcloud-arm64-20250804-2194.qcow2) and to my surprise my home is not mounting anymore.

When I create the VM I get:

WARN[0000] local username "[email protected]" is not a valid Linux username (must match "^[a-z_][a-z0-9_-]*$"); using "lima" instead

and when it creates the VM, host home dir exists in the VM but it's empty:

lima
bash: line 1: cd: /Users/[email protected]/project: No such file or directory
lima@lima-lima:/Users/[email protected]$ ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 14 11:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 14 11:38 ..

I've tried mounting the dir to /home/lima.linux but that is empty as well:

mounts:
# Also tried
# - location: "{{.Home}}"
#   writable: true
- location: "/tmp/lima"
  writable: true
- location: "{{.Home}}/project"
  mountPoint: "/home/lima.linux/project"
  writable: true

lima@lima-lima:~$ pwd
/home/lima.linux
lima@lima-lima:~$ ls -la project/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 lima root 4096 Aug 14 11:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 lima root 4096 Aug 14 11:38 ..

How do I mount the home dir (or its subdir) now?

[afbjorklund]

I still get the mounts (with an invalid user name), so there is probably some mount error in the logs?

[jandubois]

This may be due to the switch from reverse-sshfs to virtiofs.

Try setting the mountType to reverse-sshfs and see if that works (because it uses a different code path than 9p and virtiofs).

[pmalek]

This may be due to the switch from reverse-sshfs to virtiofs.

Try setting the mountType to reverse-sshfs and see if that works (because it uses a different code path than 9p and virtiofs).

How can I achieve this @jandubois? Plainly setting the mountType in the lima.yaml yields errors:

+ limactl start ./lima/lima.yaml --name lima --tty=false '--set=.cpus = 6 | .memory = "10GiB" | .disk = "60GiB" | .arch = "aarch64" | .vmType = "qemu" '
WARN[0000] Non-strict YAML detected; please check for typos  comment=/Users/USER/code_/team/hack/lima/lima.yaml error="[50:3] unknown field \"mountType\"\n  47 | mounts:\n  48 | - location: \"{{.Home}}\"\n  49 |   writable: true\n> 50 |   mountType: reverse-sshfs\n         ^\n  51 | - location: \"/tmp/lima\"\n  52 |   writable: true\n  53 | # - location: \"{{.Home}}/code_\"\n  54 | "

mounts:
- location: "{{.Home}}"
  writable: true
  mountType: reverse-sshfs
- location: "/tmp/lima"
  writable: true

[pmalek]

Found it: https://lima-vm.io/docs/config/mount/#reverse-sshfs

mountType: "reverse-sshfs"

mounts:
- location: "{{.Home}}"
  writable: true

Seems to have done the trick! Do we need to document this for users somehow so that people don't hit this like I did?

[afbjorklund]

Why did it not mount with virtiofs? Was there any error in the logs?

It is natural for the mount point to be created as an empty directory

[satokaz]

The same issue is occurring. Even if I don’t explicitly specify mountType or if I set mountType: virtiofs, the host-side $HOME is not mounted. The log output from limactl start default --debug does not contain any information related to the mount.

When I set mountType: "reverse-sshfs", it works as expected:

vmType: vz
arch: "aarch64"

#mountType: virtiofs
mountType: "reverse-sshfs"
mounts:
- location: "~"
- location: "/tmp/lima"
  writable: true

macOS 15.6.1 lima version 1.2.1