Cannot enable cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1 on GCE Debian Jessie instance

Question

In order to support Docker memory limits / quotas I'd like to enable the

cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1

Linux kernel command line options on my Debian Jessie Google Cloud Compute Engine instances. After adding them to /etc/default/grub, updating and rebooting I can see the options being active in /proc/cmdline:

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-amd64 root=UUID=aeb374a4-1a04-4ed7-adac-d5c57b350575 ro console=ttyS0,38400n8 elevator=noop cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1

However, docker info still complains about them being disabled:

$ docker info
[...]
WARNING: No kernel memory limit support
WARNING: No cpu cfs quota support
WARNING: No cpu cfs period support
[...]

Any ideas? Has the kernel included with the GCE Debian image built without support for these features?

Solution

Update /etc/default/grub and set:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="cgroup_enable=memory swapaccount=1"

run update-grub && reboot

Instead of docker info (which seems to be buggy) use rather lxc-checkconfig or check-config.sh from Docker (moby) repository:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moby/moby/master/contrib/check-config.sh && bash check-config.sh

Comments

[adgud]

What is the purpose of cgroup_enable=memory parameter? It is not documented here: github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/admin-gu‌​ide/…

[Tombart]

@adgud Enables hard memory limits for cgroup tasks. Otherwise memory limits are not enforced by kernel.

[adgud]

Are you 100% sure? I've made some tests and this does not seem mandatory to me.