In GKE control plane versions 1.36.3-gke.1244000 and later, Cloud Storage FUSE CSI driver (gcsfusecsi-node) DaemonSet Pods fail to start on specific node pools.

In GKE control plane versions 1.36.3-gke.1244000 and later, Cloud Storage FUSE CSI driver (gcsfusecsi-node) DaemonSet Pods fail to start on specific node pools. The Pods crash and log the following error:

MountVolume.SetUp failed for volume "host-proc-sys-fs-fuse" : hostPath type check failed: /proc/sys/fs/fuse is not a directory.

This issue occurs during a version skew when node pools run an older kernel lacking the required host path (earlier than 6.12.67 for Container-Optimized OS, or earlier than 6.13 for Ubuntu). Affected node pool configurations include:

• All Ubuntu with containerd (ubuntu_containerd) node pools.
• Container-Optimized OS with containerd (cos_containerd) node pools on GKE versions 1.33 and earlier, 1.34 versions earlier than 1.34.6-gke.1154000, and 1.35 versions earlier than 1.35.3-gke.1389000.

Workaround: For cos_containerd node pools, upgrade the node pool to a version with the required kernel support (for example, 1.34.6-gke.1154000 or later, 1.35.3-gke.1389000 or later, or match the control plane). For ubuntu_containerd node pools, a fix is in progress. Alternatively, downgrade the control plane to a version earlier than 1.36.3-gke.1244000.