Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB

2022-05-30 06:09:48+00:00 [Note] [Entrypoint]: Entrypoint script for MariaDB Server 1:10.8.3+maria~jammy started.
2022-05-30 06:09:48+00:00 [Note] [Entrypoint]: Switching to dedicated user 'mysql'
2022-05-30 06:09:48+00:00 [Note] [Entrypoint]: Entrypoint script for MariaDB Server 1:10.8.3+maria~jammy started.
2022-05-30 06:09:49+00:00 [Note] [Entrypoint]: MariaDB upgrade information missing, assuming required
2022-05-30 06:09:49+00:00 [Note] [Entrypoint]: MariaDB upgrade (mariadb-upgrade) required, but skipped due to $MARIADB_AUTO_UPGRADE setting
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] mariadbd (server 10.8.3-MariaDB-1:10.8.3+maria~jammy) starting as process 1 ...
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.11
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: Number of transaction pools: 1
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: Using crc32 + pclmulqdq instructions
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] mariadbd: O_TMPFILE is not supported on /tmp (disabling future attempts)
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Warning] mariadbd: io_uring_queue_init() failed with ENOSYS: check seccomp filters, and the kernel version (newer than 5.1 required)
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Warning] InnoDB: liburing disabled: falling back to innodb_use_native_aio=OFF
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, total size = 128.000MiB, chunk size = 2.000MiB
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: File system buffers for log disabled (block size=512 bytes)
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [ERROR] InnoDB: Upgrade after a crash is not supported. The redo log was created with MariaDB 10.5.4.
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [ERROR] InnoDB: Plugin initialization aborted with error Generic error
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: Starting shutdown...
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error.
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed.
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [Note] Plugin 'FEEDBACK' is disabled.
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB
2022-05-30  6:09:49 0 [ERROR] Aborting

Recently, we were working on a MariaDB installation in Docker which was using the latest version of the container. The definition in our configuration file was as follows:

# An excerpt from our docker-compose.yml
mariadb_alpha:
    depends_on:
      - another_container
    image: mariadb
    container_name: mariadb_alpha
    networks:
      - mariadb_alpha
    volumes:
      - /alpha/mysql:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: qwerty
      MYSQL_DATABASE: aplha
      MYSQL_USER: user
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: password

After an update, the database stopped working and the logs were giving the above errors. Specifically, we got the error that InnoDB was an unknown or unsupported storage engine which is really bad! The command we used to view the logs is the following:

# We used the following docker command to view the logs of the container
docker container logs mariadb_alpha;

We noticed the following line from the records, which was extremely useful:

InnoDB: Upgrade after a crash is not supported. The redo log was created with MariaDB 10.5.4.

From this information, we were able to understand that the last time the database functioned properly, it was using MariaDB version 10.5.4. By visiting the official docker image website for MariaDB, we were able to see that there was a version tagged 10.5. We modified our YML file and changed the image of the container to the one below which uses the 10.5 tagged image:

# An excerpt from our docker-compose.yml
mariadb_alpha:
    ...
    image: mariadb:10.5
    ...

Then, we rebuilt our container using the docker-compose command:

#We increase the timeout to avoid issues
export COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT=180;
docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans;

After the setup was complete, we were able to see that the container was working as expected! We reverted the change in the YML file back to image: mariadb and executed docker-compose once more. The MariaDB container was updated to the latest version and was working as expected again!