Overlay2 not enabled by default with get.docker.com on Ubuntu LTS. 24.04

General
1

Sometime in the past week or two, installing Docker on Linux does not enable overlay2, as it had for some years.

Is this a feature or a bug?

If you want to install Discourse (you’re using it now!), this is a problem. Here’s an example of someone other than me complaining about it, as well as the work-around.

I’ve updated my install scripts (I install Discourse for a living) to just create /etc/docker/daemon.json every time, but I’m afraid that this will bite people somehow sometime in the future.

2

This is no accident:

  • As of Docker Engine v29, the containerd image store becomes the default for image layer and content management for new installs.
  • Legacy graph drivers are still available, but are now deprecated. New installs can still opt out of Containerd image store if there is any issue.

(source: https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-engine-version-29/)

I compared the output of docker info from an existing installation, deleted it, removed /var/lib/docker, re-installed docker and indeed overlay2 is not used anymore. This is to be expected.

<  Storage Driver: overlay2
<   Backing Filesystem: xfs

<   Supports d_type: true
<   Using metacopy: false
<   Native Overlay Diff: true
<   userxattr: false
---
>  Storage Driver: overlayfs
>   driver-type: io.containerd.snapshotter.v1
1 Like
3

Thanks! I’ll report this to the Discourse folks