2

I'd like to control whether docker operates on a persistent storage or on a persistent storage overlayed with a volatile one.

It is because I have the filesystem on an SD card (Raspberry Pi) and it needs to last long. I mostly want to operate on a read-only filesystem (ext4) overlayed with tmpfs (run containers on it), but when I detect that an update is available I want to unmount overlayfs, switch filesystem as read-write, update the image, then switch everything back to the tmpfs-overlayed read-only filesystem.

# mv /var/lib/docker /var/lib/docker~
# mkdir -p /var/lib/docker /tmp/docker /tmp/work
# mount -t overlay -o lowerdir=/var/lib/docker~,upperdir=/tmp/docker,workdir=/tmp/work overlay /var/lib/docker
# docker daemon --storage-driver devicemapper

I tried two storage drivers: overlay2 and devicemapper (loop). The former refused to work on overlayfs underlying filesystem (it is also mentioned in the documentation that it is not supported), the latter consumes all my memory and then Docker gets killed by OS. The behaviour is the same for Raspberry Pi and my PC.

The only storage that should work is vfs, but from what I have read, it is very inefficient for storage (no Copy-on-Write), so it is of no use for me.

Now I'm giving a try to do it with aufs storage driver and overlayfs backing filesystem (Docker documentation doesn't state that it is disabled). I hope it will work but it has some disadvantages: aufs is not supported by mainline Linux kernel.

Is there some other way to switch between the two filesystems? Or could the SD card saving be done by some completely different way (e.g. running in-memory containers)?

pallly
  • 629
  • 5
  • 13
  • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61335090/raspberry-pi-4b-issues-with-docker-not-running-because-of-aufs I think we have similiar issues still after 3 years ugh – brantchyoga Apr 21 '20 at 02:50

1 Answers1

0

EDIT: Sorry, this finally DOES NOT WORK!!!. Docker daemon starts but is unable to create containers. This is the error:

Handler for POST /v1.24/containers/create returned error: error creating aufs mount to /var/lib/docker/aufs/mnt c549130a63857658f8675fd84296afae46293a9f7ae54e9ee04e83c231db600f-init: invalid argument

aufs storage driver with overlayfs backing filesystem works. For now it seems like the only option, however I'm not satisfied with the solution, because it looks like a hack to me and because aufs is not in mainline kernel so I needed to compile the kernel myself.

This is how I did it (it's quite a hack, please advice me to do it better):

  • on my PC:

    $ git clone https://github.com/p4l1ly/rpi-kernel
$ cd rpi-kernel
$ vagrant up

    ...wait some quite long time...

    $ vagrant ssh
    $ cp /var/kernel_build/results/kernel-20161003-100112/rpi2_3/kernel7.img /vagrant/
    $ exit
$ sudo cp kernel7.img /mnt

  • then on the SD card:

    # mv /var/lib/docker /var/lib/docker~
# mkdir -p /var/lib/docker /tmp/docker /tmp/work
# mount -t overlay -o lowerdir=/var/lib/docker~,upperdir=/tmp/docker,workdir=/tmp/work overlay /var/lib/docker
# docker daemon --storage-driver aufs
pallly
  • 629
  • 5
  • 13