docker-volume-mkfs

Docker volume plugin manages volumes by formatting partitions. You provide it with a list of available partitions and to create a volume it formats the partition and Docker then mounts it into your container as a volume. When volume is removed, partition is returned to available partitions, to be reformatted for the next volume.

This allows one to always get a clean unfragmented volume and deleting the volume is quick. If you have relatively short lived containers with millions of files created in a volume during their life time, fragmentation and file deletion can become a problem.

The plugin was created to make benchmarks better. Each benchmark run gets a fresh file system and cleanup after a run is quick.

Features:

• Creates volumes with freshly formatted partitions.
• Supports ext4 (default, unless changed through CLI arguments) and xfs file systems, which you can choose using volume option fs.
• Discarding volumes is quick (just unmount).
• When partition gets full, the volume gets full.

Installation

Releases page contains a list of stable versions. Each includes:

• Statically compiled binaries.
• Docker images.
• Docker plugin images.

You should just download/use the latest one.

The tool is implemented in Go. You can use Docker to install the plugin. For example, for v0.1.0 version:

docker plugin install --alias mkfs --grant-all-permissions \
 registry.gitlab.com/go-benchmark-kvstore/docker-volume-mkfs/plugin-tag/v0-1-0:latest \
 args="/dev/nvme0n1p1 /dev/nvme1n1p1 /dev/nvme2n1p1 /dev/nvme3n1p1"

To install the latest development version (main branch), use registry.gitlab.com/go-benchmark-kvstore/docker-volume-mkfs/plugin-branch/main:latest for its Docker plugin image. That allows you to upgrade the plugin when the main branch is updated:

docker plugin disable mkfs
docker plugin upgrade --grant-all-permissions mkfs
docker plugin enable mkfs

Usage

You can use it for volumes of your container using --volume-driver argument:

docker run --volume-driver mkfs ...

You can also create a named volume:

docker volume create --driver mkfs --opt fs=xfs <name>

GitHub mirror

There is also a read-only GitHub mirror available, if you need to fork the project there.