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I've been doing a lot of Raspberry Pi work, but that means I have to carry about my Pi (or SSH home), and well, the Pi isn't the fastest in the world. I've been using Docker for running things like Postgres, and was thinking it would be awesome to just download a Docker image of the ARM build of Debian Jessie, and have everything function as if it was actually running in a real rPi. Even better if I could just somehow then quickly mirror this to an SD card and throw it into a real rPi.

Has anyone explored this? Everything I'm finding is about running Docker on the rPi, not running Docker to emulate an rPi.

tibbon
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  • Docker isn't a VM or emulation environment. A Docker container runs on the same OS as the host machine, isolated from either host processes or other containers – Panagiotis Kanavos Aug 05 '16 at 14:06
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34051322/is-there-a-vagrant-box-that-simulates-a-raspberry-pi – hrbrmstr Aug 05 '16 at 14:06
  • Panagiotis Kanavos - can you tell me more about that? I'm running several linux containers on OS X, (either using virtualbox and/or the system level hypervisor), so I think there is a level of emulation and VMs happening. That's why I have to think this is possible. – tibbon Aug 05 '16 at 15:58
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    This looks a lot more like what you're looking for: it uses QEMU to emulate ARM inside a Docker container on OS X: https://hub.docker.com/r/ryankurte/docker-rpi-emu/ – Anthony Hall Jul 08 '17 at 09:06
  • Is the answer on this now different in 2018? – tibbon Apr 12 '18 at 21:01

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Based on the answers and comments to similar questions - such as this one on the Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange site I think that the short answer to "no" (or at least not without a lot of effort)

Your problem is that as mentioned in the comments Docker doesn't do full-on virtualisation (that's kind of the point of it) so you can't get an ARM Raspbian Docker image and run it on an x86 Virtualbox host - which is what it sounds like you'd like to do.

The Docker image needs to be built for the same architecture as the host system. you get the same problem if you try to run x86 Docker images on the Raspberry Pi if it is acting as a Docker host.

By way of a solution - what I'd suggest is running a Debian VM on your Mac. Raspbian is close enough to Debian that you'll have a fairly "Pi-like" environment to develop in and can copy your code to an SD card when you're done.

If you want an easy way to manage the configuration so that the number of cores, RAM, disk space etc matches your Pi, then Vagrant may be a good solution.

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bunnmatt
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