Home / ubuntu / Questions / 748135
Accepted
Greg
Asked: 2016-03-21 05:37:00 +0800 CST

Disk usage for the same drive shows 20K in the host and 16G in the container

  • 772

When comparing the disk usage for a mounted harddrive the usage is completely different when compared between the host and the container. I am running Ubuntu 14.04 on the host and in the lxc container.

The hard drive is mounted on the host as confirmed by /etc/mtab which has the following entry: /dev/nvme0n1 /mnt/SSD ext4 rw 0 0. The drive however is not mounted using /etc/fstab. The drive is mounted inside the lxc container using fstab settings in: /var/lib/lxc/container_name/fstab.

From the host:

# du -hs /mnt/SSD/
20K     /mnt/SSD/

# df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                        63G  4.0K   63G   1% /dev
tmpfs                       13G  1.4M   13G   1% /run
/dev/mapper/sifr--vg-root  314G  241G   58G  81% /
none                       4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none                       5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                        63G     0   63G   0% /run/shm
none                       100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
/dev/sda1                  236M  100M  124M  45% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1               1.1T   71M  1.1T   1% /mnt/SSD

From the container:

$ du -hs /mnt/SSD/
16G /mnt/SSD/

$ df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/sifr--vg-root  314G  241G   58G  81% /
none                       4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none                        13G  136K   13G   1% /run
none                       5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                        63G  4.0K   63G   1% /run/shm
none                       100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
  1. How and why does the same drive shows two different usages?
  2. Which is the correct usage?

Update: After unmounting the drive using sudo umount /dev/nvme0n1, I now see 16GB disk usage in the host:

$ du -hs /mnt/SSD/
16G     /mnt/SSD/

I mounted another drive /dev/sdb using /etc/fstab and gave the container access to it using the same method: /var/lib/lxc/container_name/fstab. The second drive's usage is also consistent and the contents are available in both the container and the host.

The differences between the two drives are that /dev/nvme0n1 is a nvme drive which was mounted manually, whereas /dev/sdb is a magnetic drive and was mounted using /etc/fstab.

What could be causing the difference in the behaviour and how to make /dev/nvme0n1 available in the container?

disk-usage

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The reason is, the host has access to the mounted drive, the container does not. This is because there is nothing mounted at /mnt/SSD in the container. So the host accesses and stores data on the SSD (/dev/nvme0n1) when it goes beyond /mnt/SSD while the container does access a directory on its root disk (/dev/mapper/sifr--vg-root).

    To have this in the container you need a bind mount and you may let create a directory in the file system of the container. To do so you need to add the create=dir option in the fstab of the container:

    /mnt/SSD      /moint/point/in/the/container    none   bind,create=dir

    >

    • create=dir (will do a mkdir_p on the path)

    • create=file (will do a mkdir_p on the dirname + a fopen on the path)

    • 1