Docker Error response from daemon: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): no space left on device

Question

I need to create a docker's image from a virtual box image. The file is 16GB. When I run the command line # tar -c . | docker import - <myImagename> appear this error below.

P.S. : The container is empty.

Error:

Error response from daemon: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): write /var/lib/docker/overlay2/f8bb15057c3b3578c13e1122be1d00ca72b3301b7a0bf27262edc759e9f207fb/diff/var/lib/docker/overlay2/f8bb15057c3b3578c13e1122be1d00ca72b3301b7a0bf27262edc759e9f207fb/diff/var/lib/cassandra/commitlog/CommitLog-6-1633100360364.log: no space left on device

Docker info:

Client:
 Context:    default
 Debug Mode: false
 Plugins:
  app: Docker App (Docker Inc., v0.9.1-beta3)
  buildx: Build with BuildKit (Docker Inc., v0.6.1-docker)
  scan: Docker Scan (Docker Inc., v0.8.0)

Server:
 Containers: 0
  Running: 0
  Paused: 0
  Stopped: 0
 Images: 1
 Server Version: 20.10.8
 Storage Driver: overlay2
  Backing Filesystem: xfs
  Supports d_type: true
  Native Overlay Diff: true
  userxattr: false
 Logging Driver: json-file
 Cgroup Driver: cgroupfs
 Cgroup Version: 1
 Plugins:
  Volume: local
  Network: bridge host ipvlan macvlan null overlay
  Log: awslogs fluentd gcplogs gelf journald json-file local logentries splunk syslog
 Swarm: inactive
 Runtimes: io.containerd.runc.v2 io.containerd.runtime.v1.linux runc
 Default Runtime: runc
 Init Binary: docker-init
 containerd version: e25210fe30a0a703442421b0f60afac609f950a3
 runc version: v1.0.1-0-g4144b63
 init version: de40ad0
 Security Options:
  seccomp
   Profile: default
 Kernel Version: 3.10.0-1127.el7.x86_64
 Operating System: CentOS Linux 7 (Core)
 OSType: linux
 Architecture: x86_64
 CPUs: 1
 Total Memory: 15.51GiB
 Name: GDBDEV03
 ID: UGGJ:AIIA:7C44:DZXR:PNYH:2WQH:GPKI:TFUL:N2WZ:5RRB:X3JK:VU3B
 Docker Root Dir: /var/lib/docker
 Debug Mode: false
 Registry: https://index.docker.io/v1/
 Labels:
 Experimental: false
 Insecure Registries:
  127.0.0.0/8
 Live Restore Enabled: false

EDIT

[root@GDBDEV03 chroot0]# df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                 7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs                    7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    7.8G  8.7M  7.8G   1% /run
tmpfs                    7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos-root   14G   13G  1.3G  91% /
/dev/sda1               1014M  152M  863M  15% /boot
tmpfs                    1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/0

Answer 1

It's not clear exactly what you're attempting to do (where is ., and is this a local docker engine or are you sending the image to a remote node). And putting a VM image inside of a container image is a significant code smell (containers aren't a VM).

That said, from description, you have a 16GB file you're trying to package on a system with 1.3G available to docker (assuming you are running docker from /var/lib/docker). There's just no way that's going to work under any conditions. Typically you want 2-3x the space available to handle the copies needed to package the layers.

So for your root partition, you'd want to expand that from 14GB to 45GB (13 current + 3x16). Steps to expand the partition depend on your underlying storage and filesystem type, and would be more appropriate for superuser.SE.