Failure on image pull: UtilityVM: Incorrect function.: unknown

Hi folks,

On nerdctl CI, we do see this error quite often, on a simple image pull.

nerdctl ticket is here: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/issues/3524

It looks like a command such as:

C:\Users\runneradmin\go\bin\nerdctl.exe --namespace=nerdctl-test pull --quiet gcr.io/k8s-staging-e2e-test-images/busybox:1.29-2

Will occasionally return:

        Stderr:   time="2024-10-08T23:21:46Z" level=fatal msg="failed to extract layer sha256:f2032cdb21dfb9f3d6fdd3797ea992ec05415e5a6a57f9eb36b6646496db8d09: hcsshim::ProcessUtilityVMImage \\\\?\\C:\\ProgramData\\containerd\\root\\io.containerd.snapshotter.v1.windows\\snapshots\\2\\UtilityVM: Incorrect function.: unknown"        

This is with containerd v2 rc5 and nerdctl main - but probably has been there for a while.

Does this ring a bell? Or do you have some insight for me on where to look / how to further diagnose this?
Could be a containerd issue I guess? Or do you think this is rather hcsshim?

Thanks in advance.

cc @AkihiroSuda

Start by reproducing the nerdctl pull command on Windows with containerd v2 rc5 and nerdctl main, then trace the intermittent failure at hcsshim::ProcessUtilityVMImage. Compare the containerd, nerdctl, and hcsshim context described in the linked ticket and determine whether the failure can be attributed to this repository. Done means documenting an actionable root cause or narrowing the failure to another component.