Docker: error creating aufs mount, despite aufs being supported on Ubuntu 19.01 bootable usb

Question

I am fairly new to linux and docker, so apologies for the essay!

I have a bootable USB with Ubuntu 19.01 persistent data storage. I installed docker on this using the steps outlined in the official docker installation guide. The issue I faced during installation was related to the recommended packages not being installed:

Recommended packages:
  aufs-tools cgroupfs-mount | cgroup-lite pigz

I tried installing them manually, however I get the following message:

sudo apt-get install aufs-tools
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package aufs-tools is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'aufs-tools' has no installation candidate

In any case, these packages not being present did not cause the installation to fail. Thereafter I ran the hello world example and saw the following error:

Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
0e03bdcc26d7: Pull complete 
Digest: sha256:8e3114318a995a1ee497790535e7b88365222a21771ae7e53687ad76563e8e76
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest
docker: Error response from daemon: error creating aufs mount to /var/lib/docker/aufs/mnt/db076c46f5f437911f80b48a2a53b8be05759964c059ad2f6a1389c0de377627-init: mount target=/var/lib/docker/aufs/mnt/db076c46f5f437911f80b48a2a53b8be05759964c059ad2f6a1389c0de377627-init data=br:/var/lib/docker/aufs/diff/db076c46f5f437911f80b48a2a53b8be05759964c059ad2f6a1389c0de377627-init=rw:/var/lib/docker/aufs/diff/3292099914e3c5804fbc573e521b32204a3b0cfef49aa3988677539bbf490624=ro+wh,dio,xino=/dev/shm/aufs.xino: invalid argument.
See 'docker run --help'.

When I run the docker info, I get the following output (truncated):

 Storage Driver: aufs
  Root Dir: /var/lib/docker/aufs
  Backing Filesystem: overlayfs
  Dirs: 2
  Dirperm1 Supported: false

Is it fair to say that based on the above output, my kernel supports the aufs? I tried to confirm that by running grep aufs /proc/filesystems and got the following:

nodev aufs

When I run df -Th /var/lib/docker on my root dir, I get:

Filesystem     Type     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/cow           overlay  227G  4.7G  211G   3% /

Based on everything I have outlined above, I don't know why I am seeing the Error response from daemon: error creating aufs mount error?

I can only get docker to work by appending --storage-driver=devicemapper to the /lib/systemd/system/docker.service file like so:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd --storage-driver=devicemapper -H fd://