Mariadb now is using native Linux fallocate for creating the ibdata file. It fails in alpine edge and alpine 3.8 running as containers.

2018-06-29 19:11:12 140013615233928 [ERROR] InnoDB: preallocating 12582912 bytes for file ./ibdata1 failed with error 95
2018-06-29 19:11:12 140013615233928 [ERROR] InnoDB: Could not set the file size of ‘./ibdata1’. Probably out of disk space
2018-06-29 19:11:12 140013615233928 [ERROR] InnoDB: Database creation was aborted with error Generic error. You may need to delete the ibdata1 file before trying to start up again.
2018-06-29 19:11:13 140013615233928 [ERROR] Plugin ‘InnoDB’ init function returned error.
2018-06-29 19:11:13 140013615233928 [ERROR] Plugin ‘InnoDB’ registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed.
2018-06-29 19:11:13 140013615233928 [ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB
2018-06-29 19:11:13 140013615233928 [ERROR] Aborting

(from redmine: issue id 9046, created on 2018-06-29)