Why port Docker to the Raspberry Pi? | Hacker News Reader

Why port Docker to the Raspberry Pi?

resin.io

83 pointsalexandros8 comments

I really appreciate your work even I'm not interested in Raspberry Pi. But there is one topic I'm interested in and since you've done this port, I really like to get your opinion. With Android 4.4, Linux kernel of Android will be upgraded to 3.8 which is minimum requirement for Docker and since Docker team is trying to make Docker work without AUFS, do you think we can run Docker on Android? This question may be "Can we run Docker on Darwin?" or "Can we run Docker on that Linux kernel and Android inside of it?"

It's something we're tremendously interested in as we'd like to be able to reach as many devices as possible. In fact one of our favourite devices to play with is the mk808[1] which is natively an Android device. We've had to put Ubuntu on it to get it to play along, but the Android install still performs a lot better (and needs no maintenance from us) so we'd love to just be able to work with that.

What we've done gets Docker over the 32-bit and "ARM architecture" barriers, so Android should be very feasible. Even the 3.8 kernel shouldn't be absolutely necessary since we got the devicemapper version of Docker to work (though there may be other gotchas).

In other news, chromium can now run on Wayland, which can run on Android, and also Docker can run chromium inside it, so Docker-on-Android is the last missing link for some pretty mindblowing use cases.

If anyone's interested in working on that, my email is in my profile, we'll help however we can.

[1]: http://www.geekbuying.com/item/MK808-Dual-Core-Android-4-1-J...

It actually opens up the possibility of better-than-chroot Debian (or whatever) on Android. Very cool.

Did you look at cubieboard and the whole linux-sunxi thing ?

That looks super-interesting, thanks for pointing it out.

On the docker without AUFS point - we also got docker working rpi using the device mapper instead, so it's very possible :)

Very cool.

I'd really love it if someone made a distributed systems project in a box. i.e. make a raspberry pi that can be added to like a lego brick, so you could put like 10 together, and make it trivial to rapidly deploy like 4 copies of an app to each one and have all the networking set up automatically so it simulates having 40 machines on the internet.

This would be a really cool way for prototyping out distributed applications, and possibly even making a common framework for developing actors that are cooperative but greedy, with lots of strategies for balancing the needs of an individual actor with that of the group. Torrent swarms and bitcoin are two examples of such distributed systems and making an easy way to prototype more would help us replace more and more centralized systems with distributed ones.

Just for fun, I'm working on a small Docker distribution for the Pi using 3.12 + uClibc + BusyBox. It's currently ~13 MB but can probably be reduced more.

If you're interested in doing it yourself, I've just been using rpi-buildroot[1] and tweaking it.

[1] https://github.com/gamaral/rpi-buildroot

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