The union filesystem
The union filesystem allows the files and directories of separate filesystems, known as layers, to be transparently overlaid to create a new virtual filesystem. While starting a container, Docker overlays all the layers attached to an image and creates a read-only filesystem. On top of that, Docker creates a read/write layer that is used by the container's runtime environment. You can read the Pulling an image and running a container recipe of this chapter for more details. Docker can use several union filesystem variants, including AUFS, Btrfs, zfs, overlay, overlay2, and DeviceMapper.
Docker also has a virtual file system (VFS) storage driver. A VFS doesn't support copy-on-write (COW) and is not a union filesystem. ...
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