Failures in my syslog

P

promoxer

Active Member
Apr 21, 2023
245
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```
2025-05-13T08:39:28.022987+08:00 pve kernel: [224672.570816] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:31.040993+08:00 pve kernel: [224675.588274] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:33.857989+08:00 pve kernel: [224678.405149] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:38.081990+08:00 pve kernel: [224682.629884] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:39.734986+08:00 pve kernel: [224684.282168] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:45.867988+08:00 pve kernel: [224690.415398] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:46.098986+08:00 pve kernel: [224690.646447] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:48.148992+08:00 pve kernel: [224692.696094] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:50.236988+08:00 pve kernel: [224694.784246] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
2025-05-13T08:39:51.793989+08:00 pve kernel: [224696.341586] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath
```

I'm getting alot of these in my `/var/log/syslog`, any ideas why?
 
Please provide some more information about your setup, esp. storage.
PVE does not use overlayfs by default for anything.

Have you maybe installed some OCI runtime like Docker onto the host directly and/or inside an LXC?
 
Then the above error messages stem from that. LXCs share the host kernel, so you will see kernel warnings/errors stemming from that in the host log.

Please note that running Docker in LXC is discouraged/not recommended, as it might lead to sudden and unpredictable problems, esp. with regard to networking (as Docker heavily interferes with host networking).
It is rather recommended to run it inside a VM, as also noted as such in our admin guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_pct
 
promoxer said:
but that failure log has nothing to do with network right?
Click to expand...
No, in this case it's related to storage, i.e. something w.r.t. to the Docker images.
OCI runtimes like Docker use overlayfs to construct the final filesystem that containers see, by overlaying each OCI image layer with the next one.

You can look in the Docker daemon log itself, maybe there are some errors.
Best would probably to ask with the project you linked above, as this isn't really a supported configuration ..
 
Will Proxmox 9 support for docker images prevent these errors? My syslog is 75GB...
 
No. Why do you have /var/log/syslog and why isn't logrotate taking care of it?
 
Are you saying I should not have a /var/log/syslog, in that case, why do we need logrotate?
And are you saying that /var/log/syslog cannot be 75GB in less than 24 hours?
 
I'm saying that I don't have /var/log/syslog and that files in /var/log/ should be rotated. 75G of logging per day is quite a lot though.
What storage do you use for the virtual disk? How is docker storage configured?
 
Last edited:
The problem is the log gets polluted with useless information and there is like multiples of them every 1 second

Can this message be prevented? I hesitate to say switch off, because I don't know exactly what I'm actually switching off
 
Impact said:
I'm saying that I don't have /var/log/syslog and that files in /var/log/ should be rotated. 75G of logging per day is quite a lot though.
What storage do you use for the virtual disk? How is docker storage configured?
Click to expand...
1. ZFS in proxmox
2. I have ZFS folder mountpoints into LXC and docker runs in the LXC
 
Impact said:
If you just simply want to ignore these have a look here. Also you can apt autopurge rsyslog if you don't need it.
Click to expand...
1. I ran `systemctl edit syslog.service` instead because I don't have a `qemu-guest-agent` service
2. Added
Code: 
[Service]
LogFilterPatterns=~overlayfs
3. But those lines still keep appearing
4. Those `2026-04-14T20:32:49.051936+08:00 pve kernel: [12537.037122] overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath` appear to be coming from the kernel, am I right?
 
Last edited:
The eventual solution to stop polluting the logs was to add a line :msg, contains, "overlayfs: failed to clone lowerpath" in /etc/rsyslog.conf
 
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