Troubleshoot volume errors
Estimated reading time: 1 minuteThis topic discusses errors which may occur when you use Docker volumes or bind mounts.
Error: Unable to remove filesystem
Some container-based utilities, such
as Google cAdvisor, mount Docker system
directories, such as /var/lib/docker/
, into a container. For instance, the
documentation for cadvisor
instructs you to run the cadvisor
container as
follows:
$ sudo docker run \
--volume=/:/rootfs:ro \
--volume=/var/run:/var/run:rw \
--volume=/sys:/sys:ro \
--volume=/var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro \
--publish=8080:8080 \
--detach=true \
--name=cadvisor \
google/cadvisor:latest
When you bind-mount /var/lib/docker/
, this effectively mounts all resources of
all other running containers as filesystems within the container which mounts
/var/lib/docker/
. When you attempt to remove any of these containers, the
removal attempt may fail with an error like the following:
Error: Unable to remove filesystem for
74bef250361c7817bee19349c93139621b272bc8f654ae112dd4eb9652af9515:
remove /var/lib/docker/containers/74bef250361c7817bee19349c93139621b272bc8f654ae112dd4eb9652af9515/shm:
Device or resource busy
The problem occurs if the container which bind-mounts /var/lib/docker/
uses statfs
or fstatfs
on filesystem handles within /var/lib/docker/
and does not close them.
Typically, we would advise against bind-mounting /var/lib/docker
in this way.
However, cAdvisor
requires this bind-mount for core functionality.
If you are unsure which process is causing the path mentioned in the error to
be busy and preventing it from being removed, you can use the lsof
command
to find its process. For instance, for the error above:
$ sudo lsof /var/lib/docker/containers/74bef250361c7817bee19349c93139621b272bc8f654ae112dd4eb9652af9515/shm
To work around this problem, stop the container which bind-mounts
/var/lib/docker
and try again to remove the other container.