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Docker desktop status bar reports an available VM Disk Size that is not the same as the virtual disk limit set in Settings–>Resources.
I’m trying to confirm if this is a bug, or if I need to take action to increase the VM Disk Size available beyond just updating the Settings - Resources → Virtual disk limit in order to avoid running out of VM disk space for my docker containers.
Macbook Pro with M2 ARM
Sonoma 14.1 OS
Docker 4.24.2
Interesting. I don’t know why those values are different. I got similar differences, except that I have much smaller space so the difference is smaller too.
The usage is accurate, but the available space seems to be a bug, unless it’s specific to a container and not the whole VM
Support shared the following
After further checking with our team, it appears that the 2TB limit is actually coming from the partition table. You can refer to the thread here:
From Docker Desktop, the UI shows the actual disk storage of 3.7TB on your machine. But since we aren’t using GPT IIRC, there is a limit of 2TB on the virtual disk limit and that’s why the status bar shows 2TB on your screen.
I need resources to research now to understand how I investigate and resolve this. Any thoughts?
I don’t think you can do anything. If the partition table inside the virtual machine is not GPT but MBR which doesn’t support larget partitions than 2TB, you can’t create a larget VM root disk than 2TB. Docker Desktop has one vitual disk. Inside the Vm you would see /dev/vda and there is one partition called /dev/vda1. I couldn’t find the information about the type of the partition as fdisk didn’t show it as it shows it on my Linux machine but if it doesn’t support large disks, you can’t increase the size larger than 2TB.
Usually such a large disk is not required and data is stored on a volume which does not help in case of Docker Desktop, but you could bind mount a host folder which of course could decrease the performance On the other hand, Docker Desktop is for development where working with more then 2 TB is not usual…
