Just recently had below error when trying to run podman in my mac machine
$ podman machine start Starting machine "podman-machine-default" Waiting for VM ... Error: qemu exited unexpectedly with exit code 1, stderr: qemu-system-x86_64: cannot create PID file: Cannot lock pid file: Resource temporarily unavailable
Workaround is quite simple, we can run this command
$ ps -edf | grep qemu-system | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -I{} kill -9 {}; podman machine stop
And run podman again
$ podman machine start Starting machine "podman-machine-default" Waiting for VM ... Mounting volume... /Users:/Users Mounting volume... /private:/private Mounting volume... /var/folders:/var/folders
Reference :
https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/16054