Skip to content

A Virtualised Raspberry Pi inside a Docker image

License

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

nesto-software/dockerpi

 
 

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

81 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

dockerpi

Actions Status Docker Pulls Docker Image Size GitHub Donate Bitcoin Donate Lightning Donate

A Virtualised Raspberry Pi inside a Docker image

Gives you access to a virtualised ARM based Raspberry Pi machine running the Raspian operating system.

This is not just a Raspian Docker image, it's a full ARM based Raspberry Pi virtual machine environment.

Usage

docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi

By default all filesystem changes will be lost on shutdown. You can persist filesystem changes between reboots by mounting the /sdcard volume on your host:

docker run -it -v $HOME/.dockerpi:/sdcard lukechilds/dockerpi

If you have a specific image you want to mount you can mount it at /sdcard/filesystem.img:

docker run -it -v /2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img:/sdcard/filesystem.img lukechilds/dockerpi

If you only want to mount your own image, you can download a much slimmer VM only Docker container that doesn't contain the Raspbian filesystem image:

Docker Image Size Docker Image Size

docker run -it -v /2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img:/sdcard/filesystem.img lukechilds/dockerpi:vm

Which machines are supported?

By default a Raspberry Pi 1 is virtualised, however experimental support has been added for Pi 2 and Pi 3 machines.

You can specify a machine by passing the name as a CLI argument:

docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi pi1
docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi pi2
docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi pi3

Note: In the Pi 2 and Pi 3 machines, QEMU hangs once the machines are powered down requiring you to docker kill the container. See #4 for details.

Wait, what?

A full ARM environment is created by using Docker to bootstrap a QEMU virtual machine. The Docker QEMU process virtualises a machine with a single core ARM11 CPU and 256MB RAM, just like the Raspberry Pi. The official Raspbian image is mounted and booted along with a modified QEMU compatible kernel.

You'll see the entire boot process logged to your TTY until you're prompted to log in with the username/password pi/raspberry.

pi@raspberrypi:~$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.19.50+ #1 Tue Nov 26 01:49:16 CET 2019 armv6l GNU/Linux
pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /etc/os-release | head -n 1
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"
pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
model name      : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS        : 798.31
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xb76
CPU revision    : 7

Hardware        : ARM-Versatile (Device Tree Support)
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000
pi@raspberrypi:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          246Mi        20Mi       181Mi       1.0Mi        44Mi       179Mi
Swap:          99Mi          0B        99Mi

Build

Build this image yourself by checking out this repo, cd ing into it and running:

docker build -t lukechilds/dockerpi .

Build the VM only image with:

docker build -t lukechilds/dockerpi:vm --target dockerpi-vm .

Credit

Thanks to @dhruvvyas90 for his dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel repo.

License

MIT © Luke Childs

About

A Virtualised Raspberry Pi inside a Docker image

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Packages

 
 
 

Languages

  • JavaScript 57.5%
  • Shell 28.8%
  • Dockerfile 13.7%