GitHub Action which mounts a tmpfs volume on /var/lib/docker.

This action was created to solve a very specific problem that occurs when building the latest pip cryptography package inside a QEMU emulated linux/arm/v7 environment (e.g. Rasberry Pi) on a linux/amd64 computer.

The compilation of the package fails because some weirdness inside a low level library when it tries to read the filesytem while running inside a 32-bit environment that is emulated by QEMU running on a 64-bit host. Apparently a workaround for this is to swap the filesystem to a tmpfs one in order to not trigger this bug, so we make the entire /var/lib/docker folder like that.

Here are links to the biggest threads discussing this issue further:

• docker/buildx#395
• rust-lang/cargo#8719
• https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/263

This action has been inspired by the workarounds posted in the threads mentioned above, but there are three solutions I would like to give extra credit to:

• @pierotofy: For showing how to configure the swap space.
• @easimon: For providing details about GitHub runners.
• @nijel: For showing how a tmpfs can be used as a workaround.

⚠️ Please read the More Information section to understand the physical limitations of the GitHub runners before changing the values.

- name: Run Docker on tmpfs
  uses: JonasAlfredsson/docker-on-tmpfs@v1
  with:
    tmpfs_size: 5
    swap_size: 4
    swap_location: '/mnt/swapfile'

The official specifications of GitHub runner machines are the following:

• 2-core CPU
• 7 GB of RAM memory
• 14 GB of SSD disk space

However, this does not paint the whole picture, and a more detailed representation of a newly starter runner would be this:

vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 85
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8171M CPU @ 2.60GHz
cpu MHz		: 2095.197
cache size	: 36608 KB
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl xtopology cpuid pni pclmulqdq ssse3 fma cx16 pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 movbe popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch invpcid_single pti fsgsbase bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rtm mpx avx512f avx512dq rdseed adx smap clflushopt avx512cd avx512bw avx512vl xsaveopt xsavec xsaves md_clear
bugs		: cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2 spec_store_bypass l1tf mds swapgs taa itlb_multihit

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          6.8Gi       484Mi       5.3Gi       9.0Mi       1.0Gi       6.0Gi
Swap:         4.0Gi          0B       4.0Gi

NAME          TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/mnt/swapfile file   4G   0B   -2

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda       8:0    0   14G  0 disk
└─sda1    8:1    0   14G  0 part /mnt
sdb       8:16   0   86G  0 disk
├─sdb1    8:17   0 85.9G  0 part /
├─sdb14   8:30   0    4M  0 part
└─sdb15   8:31   0  106M  0 part /boot/efi

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        84G   53G   31G  63% /
devtmpfs        3.4G     0  3.4G   0% /dev
tmpfs           3.4G  4.0K  3.4G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           695M  1.1M  694M   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           3.4G     0  3.4G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb15      105M  5.2M  100M   5% /boot/efi
/dev/sda1        14G  4.1G  9.0G  32% /mnt

There is one variable that is extra interesting of those listed here, and that is GITHUB_WORKSPACE which is explained like this:

Actions and shell commands execute in this directory. An action can modify the contents of this directory, which subsequent actions can access.

This path defaults to

/home/runner/work/<repo-name>/<repo-name>

so in this repository's case it would be

/home/runner/work/docker-on-tmpfs/docker-on-tmpfs

This is also the path you will get if you run just echo ${PWD}.

With the above information we can see that, by default, we are not using the advertised 14G available on /mnt, but instead the 31G on /. Furthermore, of those 14G on /mnt 4 are used for the swap file, so it is really only 10G available there. At startup we are also using ~0.5G RAM, which means that we have about 6G to play with for our tmpfs volume.

What is important to understand is that a tmpfs volume writes its data to RAM, so if you consume more than the available the system will start moving data to the swap file on the disk. Reading data from disk is brutally slow compared to accessing it from RAM, so when this happens the system might become unusable slow. However, if you remove the swap file and fill up the RAM the system will probably crash so it is important to keep if we are to do what this action does. Linux is also pretty clever, so data more frequently accessed is less likely to be pushed to swap.

I would suggest you try to keep tmpfs_size as small as possible for your task, in order to minimize the risk of starving the other system processes. A good thing to do is also to keep the swap_size the same size as your tmpfs, and this is even more important in case you want to make the volume larger than the currently available RAM.