docker - error 139
published on Monday, October 8, 2018
If you are running archlinux like me or any other distribution with a modern kernel (≥ 4.15.0-1), and most or all of your docker containers error with error 139 on startup, it might be due to vsyscalls being disabled by default. This can be reenabled by adding the vsyscalls=emulate kernel parameter.
Note that 139 signifies a segmentation fault which is a very general runtime error. So if just one container errors, it's probably a bug in the running software, if many or most containers do, there is probably a deeper underlying problem.