I have a docker environment with 2 containers (Jenkins and Nexus, both with their own named volume).
I have a daily cron-job which deletes unused containers and images. This is working fine. But the problem is inside my devicemapper:
du -sh /var/lib/docker/
30G docker/
I can each folder in my docker folder:
Volumes (big, but that's normal in my case):
/var/lib/docker# du -sh volumes/
14G volumes/
Containers:
/var/lib/docker# du -sh containers/
3.2M containers/
Images:
/var/lib/docker# du -sh image/
5.8M image/
Devicemapper:
/var/lib/docker# du -sh devicemapper/
16G devicemapper/
/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt
is 7.3G
/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper
is 8.1G
Docker info:
Storage Driver: devicemapper
Pool Name: docker-202:1-xxx-pool
Pool Blocksize: 65.54 kB
Base Device Size: 10.74 GB
Backing Filesystem: ext4
Data file: /dev/loop0
Metadata file: /dev/loop1
Data Space Used: 5.377 GB
Data Space Total: 107.4 GB
Data Space Available: 28.8 GB
Metadata Space Used: 6.148 MB
Metadata Space Total: 2.147 GB
Metadata Space Available: 2.141 GB
Udev Sync Supported: true
What is this space and am I able to clean this without breaking stuff?
Don't use a devicemapper loop file for anything serious! Docker has big warnings about this.
The /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper
directory contains the sparse loop files that contain all the data that docker mounts. So you would need to use lvm tools to trawl around them and do things. Have a read though the remove issues with devicemapper, they are kinda sorta resolved but maybe not.
I would move away from devicemapper
where possible or use LVM thin pools on anything RHEL based. If you can't change storage drivers, the same procedure will at least clear up any allocated sparse space you can't reclaim.
Changing the docker storage driver
Changing storage driver will require dumping your /var/lib/docker
directories which contains all your docker data. There are ways to save portions of it but that involves messing around with Docker internals. Better to commit and export any containers or volumes you want to keep and import them after the change. Otherwise you will have a fresh, blank Docker install!
Export data
Stop Docker
Remove /var/lib/docker
Modify your docker startup to use the new storage driver.
Set --storage-driver=<name>
in /lib/systemd/system/docker.service
or /etc/systemd/system/docker.service
or /etc/default/docker
or /etc/sysconfig/docker
Start Docker
Import Data
AUFS
AUFS is not in the mainline kernel (and never will be) which means distro's have to actively include it somehow. For Ubuntu it's in the linux-image-extra
packages.
apt-get install linux-image-extra-$(uname -r) linux-image-extra-virtual
Then change the storage driver option to --storage-driver=aufs
OverlayFS
OverlayFS is already available in Ubuntu, just change the storage driver to --storage-driver=overlay2
or --storage-driver=overlay
if you are still using a 3.x kernel
I'm not sure how good an idea this is right now. It can't be much worse than the loop file but
The overlay2
driver is pretty solid for dev use but isn't considered production ready yet (e.g. Docker Enterprise don't provide support) but it is being pushed to become the standard driver due to the AUFS/Kernel issues.
Direct LVM Thin Pool
Instead of the devicemapper loop file you can use an LVM thin pool directly. RHEL makes this easy with a docker-storage-setup
utility that distributed with their EPEL docker package. Docker have detailed steps for setting up the volumes manually.
--storage-driver=devicemapper \
--storage-opt=dm.thinpooldev=/dev/mapper/docker-thinpool \
--storage-opt dm.use_deferred_removal=true
Docker 17.06+ supports managing simple direct-lvm
block device setups for you.
Just don't run out of space in the LVM volume, ever. You end up with an unresponsive Docker daemon that needs to be killed and then LVM resources that are still in use that are hard to clean up.
First, what is devicemapper (official documentation)
Device Mapper has been included in the mainline Linux kernel since version 2.6.9. It is a core part of RHEL family of Linux distributions.
The devicemapper driver stores every image and container on its own virtual device. These devices are thin-provisioned copy-on-write snapshot devices.
Device Mapper technology works at the block level rather than the file level. This means that devicemapper storage driver's thin provisioning and copy-on-write operations work with blocks rather than entire files.
The devicemapper is the default Docker storage driver on some Linux distributions.
Docker hosts running the devicemapper storage driver default to a configuration mode known as loop-lvm. This mode uses sparse files to build the thin pool used by image and container snapshots
Docker 1.10 and later no longer matches image layer IDs with directory names in /var/lib/docker.
However, there are two key directories.
- The
/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt
directory contains the mount points for image and container layers.
- The /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/metadatadirectory contains one file for every image layer and container snapshot.
If your docker info
does show your Storage Driver
is devicemapper
(and not aufs
), proceed with caution with those folders.
See for instance issue 18867.