dockerpi

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 brahmanai/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 brahmanai/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 brahmanai/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 brahmanai/dockerpi:vm

SSH into your virtualised Pi

Before connecting to your Pi, you will need to know the IP assigned to the container executed with docker run:

$ docker ps --format '{{.Names}}' | while read line; do echo -e "$(docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' $line)\t$line"; done

172.17.0.2  strange_bassi

Now we can simply SSH into the outputed IP using the default pi user and password:

$ ssh [email protected]
[email protected]'s password:
Linux raspberrypi 4.19.50+ #1 Tue Nov 26 01:49:16 CET 2019 armv6l

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Tue Jan 28 01:45:42 2020 from 172.17.0.1

SSH is enabled and the default password for the 'pi' user has not been changed.
This is a security risk - please login as the 'pi' user and type 'passwd' to set a new password.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $

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 brahmanai/dockerpi .

Build the VM only image with:

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

Credit

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

License

MIT © Luke Childs