FreeBSD and Docker

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Wed Jun 10 14:52:54 UTC 2015


On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 07:29:09 -0700, Jason Cox wrote:
> What are you doing wrong? You are trying to run docker on FreeBSD. Docker
> is a containerization technology built for Linux. It uses LXC (which is
> Linux Containers) for older Kernels or docker specific bits which are now
> part of the modern Linux kernel 3.10+.

It requires too many Linuxisms which aren't part of FreeBSD's
Linux ABI, so expecting Docker to work on FreeBSD is somehow
wrong.



> Docker is basically FreeBSD Jails,
> with a few more features and a lot more security issues.

It's surely possible to run a "jail equivalent" of the Docker
application package in question (here: Discourse).



> I have not looked into Discourse, but any application that requires Docker
> is not worth using at this point.

Discourse is not exactly _requiring_ Docker - there has been
a prepackaged Docker "instance" of all the components you need
to run Discourse, not more, not less. It should be possible to
run Discourse the "traditional" way - using native FreeBSD
technology.



> If
> you just cannot get Discourse working on FreeBSD, then by all means switch
> to a Linux install instead. Make sure it is not centos as it will not have
> the update Kernel drivers for better Docker support.

That is the final advice. :-)

Docker is for Linux, Jails is for FreeBSD. It's somewhat comparable
to a "pre-packaged VM image", more or less (probably less).

Oh, and doing things like

	# wget http://getsomething.example.com | sudo bash

is definitely _not_ the way you want to install software on FreeBSD.
It rather seems to be a new Linuxism that has emerged during the
recent years. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list