CODEWITHSUNDEEP
virtualizationdocker
Wolfgang
Wolfgang

Reputation: 1488

What is the difference between AUFS and devicemapper in docker?

When docker was introduced a big hype was made about docker using AUFS, allowing two different docker containers to use the same underlying layers, and thus reducing some of the overhead. Docker now seems to prefer devicemapper (e.g. default in Ubuntu 14.04). Does devicemapper provide the same functionality, or did people figure out that the advantages are not too big using AUFS ?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 664

Answers (2)

Ben Whaley
Ben Whaley

Reputation: 34426

This article details the differences between the storage backends available to docker. Devicemapper support was implemented since AUFS is not included in the kernel and thus was only available on systems (such as Ubuntu) that provided it. Because of this it is generally not recommended in production environments.

Upvotes: 3

Charles Duffy
Charles Duffy

Reputation: 295687

No, devicemapper does not provide the same functionality -- it's much, much slower; since it operates at the block-device layer, it needs to deal with mounting, unmounting, fsck'ing, etc.

The reason it's widely used is that many distributions' kernels do not support AUFS. However, if you can use AUFS, you probably should.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions