Getting started with OverlayFS and Docker

How do I get started with OverlayFS and Docker on Ubuntu 14.04 and Docker 1.2.0?

Step by step instructions anyone?

aufs is proving a pretty bad performance wise.

I’ve not used OverlayFS - alot of us use Btrfs tho.

Yeah I tried brfs and perf is way better https://meta.discourse.org/t/report-on-using-discourse-docker-on-a-coreos-image/19745/4?u=sam

Wanted to compare to overlayfs (which github use with lxc)

I’ve created a demo boot2docker iso that has overlayfs baked in (and docker support for overlayfs).
Note that vbox shared folders does not exist in this (since I couldn’t get it to work for kernel 3.18)

http://files.container42.com/boot2docker/builds/1.3.1-dev-overlayfs/boot2docker.iso

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Have you done any benchmarking? Is it faster / slower for certain kinds of operations?

I found builds to be slightly slower than btrfs… but this is all on a VM, haven’t run it natively yet.
I’m told on SSD’s overlayfs should be faster than btrfs all around.
Much much faster than devmapper, of course.

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If anyone’s still interested:

  1. use linux 3.18+ kernel with overlayfs support CONFIG_OVERLAY_FS=y
  2. start >= docker-1.4.1 with -s overlay flag

Works flawlessly so far, tested on Gentoo.

Any performance comparisons?

I haven’t done any. There is some interesting data here Getting started with OverlayFS and Docker it’s probably worth asking these guys on any updates.

wow, nice, we should bench what kind of difference it makes (if any)