Docker on ARM is cool, but it also adds some complexity and heaviness.
- You can't access some things from inside containers, e.g. Bluetooth LE.
- Processes that run in separate containers don't use shared libraries (shared RAM) so they weigh more. At least I believe so.
I recently built 5 Raspberry Pis for IoT data collection purposes, and they were slow and unreliable when running multiple Node.js apps in Docker containers. Moving the Node apps to run under plain Arch Linux systemd made the Pies noticeably more reliable and efficient.
Currently this is more of an experiment to see if it is possible to get Docker running. The image is based on Raspbian with a custom kernel compiled for working with Docker and OverlayFS. We will publish our buildscript within a couple of days on github. Based on the feedback we get we want to provide updates to the image on a regular base.
Thanks. I would very much like to see that buildscript - I've been tinkering with the idea of building something along these lines but with an Ubuntu armhf userland (given that Ubuntu on ARM has a lot of advantages for me).
- You can't access some things from inside containers, e.g. Bluetooth LE.
- Processes that run in separate containers don't use shared libraries (shared RAM) so they weigh more. At least I believe so.
I recently built 5 Raspberry Pis for IoT data collection purposes, and they were slow and unreliable when running multiple Node.js apps in Docker containers. Moving the Node apps to run under plain Arch Linux systemd made the Pies noticeably more reliable and efficient.