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.
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 $HOME/.dockerpi:/sdcard lukechilds/dockerpi
If you have a specific image you want to mount you can mount it at /sdcard/filesystem.img:
docker run -it -v /2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img:/sdcard/filesystem.img lukechilds/dockerpi
If you only want to mount your own image, you can download a much slimmer VM only Docker container that doesn't contain the Raspbian filesystem image:
docker run -it -v /2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img:/sdcard/filesystem.img lukechilds/dockerpi:vm
By default a Raspberry Pi 1 is virtualised, however experimental support has been added for Pi 2 and Pi 3 machines.
You can specify a machine by passing the name as a CLI argument:
docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi pi1
docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi pi2
docker run -it lukechilds/dockerpi pi3
Note: In the Pi 2 and Pi 3 machines, QEMU hangs once the machines are powered down requiring you to
docker killthe container. See #4 for details.
A full ARM environment is created by using Docker to bootstrap a QEMU virtual machine. The Docker QEMU process virtualises a machine with a single core ARM11 CPU and 256MB RAM, just like the Raspberry Pi. The official Raspbian image is mounted and booted along with a modified QEMU compatible kernel.
You'll see the entire boot process logged to your TTY until you're prompted to log in with the username/password pi/raspberry.
pi@raspberrypi:~$ 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 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 .
Thanks to @dhruvvyas90 for his dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel repo.
MIT © Luke Childs
