Docker error : no space left on device

Question

I installed docker on a Debian 7 machine in the following way

$ echo deb http://get.docker.io/ubuntu docker main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list
$ sudo apt-get update
$ curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ubuntu/ | sudo sh

After that when I first tried creating an Image it failed with the following error

 time="2015-06-02T14:26:37-04:00" level=info msg="[8] System error: write /sys/fs/cgroup/docker/01f5670fbee1f6687f58f3a943b1e1bdaec2630197fa4da1b19cc3db7e3d3883/cgroup.procs: no space left on device"

Here is the docker info

Containers: 2
Images: 21
Storage Driver: aufs
Root Dir: /var/lib/docker/aufs
Backing Filesystem: extfs
Dirs: 25
Dirperm1 Supported: true
Execution Driver: native-0.2
Kernel Version: 3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64
Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 7 (wheezy)
CPUs: 2
 Total Memory: 15.7 GiB


WARNING: No memory limit support
 WARNING: No swap limit support

How can I increase the memory? Where are the system configurations stored?

From Kal's suggestions:

When I got rid of all the images and containers it did free some space and the image build ran longer before failing with the same error. So the question is, which space is this referring to and how do I configure it?

Answer 1

Your cgroups have the cpuset controller enabled. This controller is mostly useful in NUMA environment where it allows to finely specify which CPU/memory bank your tasks are allowed to run.

By default the mandatory cpuset.mems and cpuset.cpus are not set which means that there is "no space left" for your task, hence the error.

The easiest way to fix this is to enable cgroup.clone_children to 1 in the root cgroup. In your case, it should be

echo 1 > /sys/fs/cgroup/docker/cgroup.clone_children

It will basically instruct the system to automatically initialize container's cpuset.mems and cpuset.cpus from their parent cgroup.