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 kill the 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 5.10.92-v8+ #1514 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jan 17 17:39:38 GMT 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux
pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /etc/os-release | head -n 1
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS        : 125.00
Features        : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xd03
CPU revision    : 4

Hardware        : BCM2835
Model           : Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
pi@raspberrypi:~$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           921Mi        42Mi       681Mi       0.0Ki       197Mi       822Mi
Swap:           99Mi          0B        99Mi

Build this image yourself by checking out this repo, cd 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