Docker crashing on Ubuntu 14.04 for any container

Question

With Jenkins running on a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server we began getting crashes on startup of test containers with the following error:

 OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:348: starting container process caused "process_linux.go:297: copying bootstrap data to pipe caused \"write init-p: broken pipe\"": unknown

Initially it was suspected that this could be due to misconfiguration with local Dockerfiles or the Jenkins server itself, however running:

docker run --rm -i -a stdin -a stdout ubuntu echo 1

Should still work and produced the same issue

Answer 1

It turned out that this was due to a recent Docker update which caused problems with the older 3x kernel found by default on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Helpfully it is possible to upgrade the kernel version on 14.04 rather than upgrading the whole OS. It can be done as described on this Ask Ubuntu article, but in short:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-xenial
sudo reboot

NB: searching the received error message revealed no other current articles online, but searching parts of it sourced a few app-specific forum posts discussing it. For this reason I felt it useful to create a more easily locatable version on here, given it will cover use cases of development, testing or even prod running containers on 14.04.