[Lxc-users] Strange heisenbug "no space left on device" errors, leftover ephemeralbind mounts?

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Stéphane Graber <stgraber at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On 12-09-10 07:31 PM, Dan Kegel wrote:
>> This is probably just a bad dream that will end when I move to
>> running lxc inside vmware instead of virtualbox.
>>
>> I'm running Ubuntu 12.04.1 in Virtualbox, and inside that, Ubuntu 10.04 via
>> lxc-start-ephemeral, and inside that, a buildbot slave.  I'm slowly working my
>> way through various issues that keep the buildbot from working properly
>> (most recently, I had to switch to aufs from overlayfs, still need to file
>> a bug for that).
>> Now the problem is that inside the container, even though there is lots of
>> disk space shown via df, I'm getting "no space left on device"
>> after running "make check" for the project I'm building.
>
> Did you check that you aren't running out of inodes? The error message
> would be identical (check with df -i).
>
>> The virtualbox has 2GB ram and 22GB disk space free.
>> I can trigger the error by running just a little bit of "make check",
>> but if I try stracing that, the problem doesn't seem to happen.
>> The other strange thing is that I'm seeing leftover ephemeralbind mounts,
>> even though the log from lxc-start-ephemeral clearly shows the umount statement.
>
> Hopefully these no longer exist with the python + lxc-hooks port as
> everything is mounted in the container's mount namespace which is killed
> on shutdown.
>
>> Both problems are triggered by running the testcase.
>>
>> Next step: switch to vmware and hope this all goes away.
>> If it doesn't, then maybe I start looking at that overlayfs bug...

Happily (?), switching to vmware player instead of virtualbox
made this go away.