Parallella Community

Hi,

Did someone succeed in running docker on the board? what are the modifications needed in order to achieve that?

Thanks.

This may be a stupid question, but why?

The Parallella is a relatively small, embedded system with no good persistent storage (I don't count SD cards as good quality), relatively little memory and no support for virtualization. Also, the Epiphany chip does not support isolation either - if you upload a program to the Epiphany, you kick out the running program. And finally, the Epiphany chip has direct access to (parts of) the physical memory and can be used to break any isolation provided by any software.

It is not a stupid question. Actually we are testing virtualization on embedded ARM boards. Lately these systems are being tested to see if they are worth being used for HPC and data centers, since they offer a good performance/price ratio and they are energy efficient.

I understand that, but wouldn't it be better to use boards which support hardware-virtualization (e.g. Cortex-A15 or anything running ARMv8)?

In any case, I haven't used Docker on the Parallella, so I can't answer your question.

Yes, we already tested hardware virtualization on cortex-A15 (e.g kvm on OMAP5) and now we are interested in lightweight virtualization since it offers significantly less overhead.

I Tried to manually configure the kernel to get the needed modules for docker but the image I built didn't work...

Just a thought: would Apache Mesos work as a kernel management layer (it plays well with docker)? Would you be able to have Mesos assigning resources as needed with Docker on top? It seems possible.