Using Microk8s and OpenEBS cStor leads to an error when creating pool claims. Anybody know why this is occurring, and how to fix it? - kubernetes

Question

I am using Microk8s (1.19, on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS) and am trying to use OpenOBS (cStor engine) for storage.
Since I'm running this locally before pushing to prod, I created virtual block devices with:
blockdevicedisk='/k8storage/diskimage'
blockdevicesize=10000
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=$blockdevicedisk bs=1M count=$blockdevicesize
sudo mkfs.ext4 $blockdevicedisk
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 /k8storage/diskimage
$lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0 7:0 0 9.8G 0 loop
loop1 7:1 0 7.8G 0 loop
sda 8:0 0 256G 0 disk
sdb 8:16 0 256G 0 disk /
I installed OpenEBS with helm, then removed 'loop' from the openebs-ndm-config -> filterconfigs -> path-filter -> exclude. So that ndm would display these as blockdevices.
$kubectl get blockdevices -n openebs
NAME NODENAME SIZE CLAIMSTATE STATUS AGE
blockdevice-87ca7d6819eab3ea3af2884f2f6e9f8e v 274877906944 Unclaimed Active 19h
blockdevice-0a6c8d26081660a37f0a87dbb316c7ae v 10485760000 Unclaimed Active 19h
blockdevice-cd43d37664edd1c880e11f5b8e9cbe60 v 8388608000 Unclaimed Active 19h
^ the last 2 are the ones I made.
I then wrote the config to create a cStor StoragePoolClaim
apiVersion: openebs.io/v1alpha1
kind: StoragePoolClaim
metadata:
name: cstor-pool-claim
spec:
name: cstor-pool-claim
type: disk
poolSpec:
poolType: striped
blockDevices:
blockDeviceList:
- blockdevice-0a6c8d26081660a37f0a87dbb316c7ae
- blockdevice-cd43d37664edd1c880e11f5b8e9cbe60
When I apply it, both the blockdevices are claimed
$kubectl get blockdevices -n openebs
NAME NODENAME SIZE CLAIMSTATE STATUS AGE
blockdevice-87ca7d6819eab3ea3af2884f2f6e9f8e v 274877906944 Unclaimed Active 19h
blockdevice-0a6c8d26081660a37f0a87dbb316c7ae v 10485760000 Claimed Active 19h
blockdevice-cd43d37664edd1c880e11f5b8e9cbe60 v 8388608000 Claimed Active 19h
which is expected.
$kubectl get spc
NAME AGE
cstor-pool-claim 18h
However, there is a problem!
$kubectl get csp
NAME ALLOCATED FREE CAPACITY STATUS READONLY TYPE AGE
cstor-pool-claim-nf0g Init false striped 19h
It never changes from Init status. There is a pod created which shows the error as
$kubectl describe pod cstor-pool-claim-nf0g-6cb75f8f49-sw6q2 -n openebs
which spews a lot of text I could show if it helps. The key part is the error message, which is:
Error: failed to create containerd task: OCI runtime create failed:
container_linux.go:370: starting container process caused:
process_linux.go:459: container init caused: rootfs_linux.go:59:
mounting
"/var/snap/microk8s/common/run/containerd/io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri/sandboxes/a9b84df9076c91b83982f157e9bacdc5a10f80846d32034dd15cdae1c1d4c4c1/shm"
to rootfs at "/dev/shm" caused: secure join: too many levels of
symbolic links: unknown
I've tried resetting my setup and re-entering the commands one-by-one to ensure that I was following the documentation, and other examples correctly, however, I keep encountering this error.
Is this a limitation of microk8s? A fault of OpenEBS? Something weird about my setup? Or did I do something wrong?
More importantly: Is there a way to get this to work correctly?