7.8. Troubleshooting OverlayFS with XFS

This section provides troubleshooting information for the check_xfs phase of Running the LOCKSS Installer.

7.8.1. Filesystem backing /var/lib/rancher is an XFS filesystem with ftype=0

The OverlayFS driver used by K3s will fail and prevent containers from starting, if the filesystem backing /var/lib/rancher is an XFS filesystem configured with the legacy ftype=0 setting that some older Linux systems defaulted to when creating XFS filesystems. To view or verify the setting of ftype from an XFS filesystem, use xfs_info (see step 1 below).

The recommended way fix to this issue is to reformat the XFS filesystem with ftype=1, or with another filesystem such as ext4. If this is not possible (e.g., because you are performing an in-place migration from LOCKSS 1.x to 2.x and the filesystem backing /var/lib/rancher is shared with other parts of the system), the workaround is to create a new XFS filesystem on another partition or a loopback device backed by a file on an existing filesystem.

Setup of the latter is described below. Commands should be run as the root user 1.

  1. (Optional) Verify the existing XFS filesystem has ftype=0:

    xfs_info BLOCK_DEVICE

    ...where BLOCK_DEVICE is the block device of the filesystem backing /var/lib/rancher.

    Tip

    Use findmnt to determine the block device of the filesystem backing /var/lib/rancher:

    findmnt --target /var/lib/rancher

    The output should look similar to the following (some parameters may be different):

    TARGET SOURCE           FSTYPE OPTIONS
/      /dev/mapper/root xfs    rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,logbufs=8,logbsize=32k,noquota

    In the example above, the block device is /dev/mapper/root (i.e., the SOURCE column).

    The output from xfs_info should look similar to the following (some parameters may be different):

    meta-data=/dev/mapper/root isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=4194304 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0
         =                       reflink=1    bigtime=1 inobtcount=1 nrext64=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=16777216, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0, ftype=0
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=16384, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

    Note

    In the example above, ftype=0. If your output contains ftype=1, there is nothing wrong with your XFS filesystem and you should not proceed with the instructions on this page!

  2. Stop the K3s service:

    systemctl stop k3s.service

  3. Rename the existing /var/lib/rancher directory:

    mv /var/lib/rancher /var/lib/rancher.backup

  4. Allocate a file for the loopback device: This file will contain the XFS filesystem that will hold the K3s runtime environment and container images. We recommend allocating a minimum of 16GB. Allocate the file on a filesystem with sufficient space.

    Note

    In this and the following examples, we allocate and use the file located at /var/lib/rancherfs.img.

    fallocate -l 16g /var/lib/rancherfs.img

  5. Create a new XFS filesystem with ftype explicitly set to 1:

    mkfs.xfs -n ftype=1 /var/lib/rancherfs.img

    You may verify ftype=1 by running:

    xfs_info /var/lib/rancherfs.img

  6. Mount the loopback to /var/lib/rancher:

    mount --mkdir -o loop /var/lib/rancherfs.img /var/lib/rancher

  7. Edit /etc/fstab to make the loopback persistent across reboots: Use your favorite text editor to open /etc/fstab and append the following line to it:

    /var/lib/rancherfs.img   /var/lib/rancher   xfs   loop   0 0

  8. Copy the existing K3s runtime environment to the new XFS filesystem:

    cp -r /var/lib/rancher.backup/* /var/lib/rancher/.

  9. Finally, restart the K3s service:

    systemctl start k3s.service

  10. (Optional) If setup of the loopback was successful and K3s is running correctly, you may reclaim space by removing /var/lib/rancher.backup:

    rm -rf /var/lib/rancher.backup

Footnotes

1

See Running Commands as root.