Recently, a native Docker client for Windows was released (>= Windows 7).
I wonder: is it possible to forward access to physical devices, running Windows as host?
With a *nix host, this seems to be possible with the following syntax:
docker run -t -i --device=/dev/ttyUSB0 ubuntu bash
(as proposed here) which would forward the USB device /dev/ttyUSB0 on a *nix system to the docker image.
A description of the --device flag can be found in the docker docs.
What would be the syntax for a Windows host?
Windows USB devices are not currently available to Docker containers run with Docker for Windows.
Answered by a Docker staff member on the 7th of July 2017 in the Docker forum.
https://forums.docker.com/t/exposing-docker-to-usb-device-in-windows-10-with-docker-toolbox/29290/3
This answer is likely to get outdated in some time, provided they will allow for this feature somehow.
This is a bad practice as it goes against the design philosophy of containers.
If you find yourself needing access to a hardware device, it's better to consider full virtualization such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM/QEMU, Xen and so on.
However, the "proper" way is to design your system
so that hardware is abstracted into a network service. In this way, you deploy the service to physical machines to which the hardware is attached, and call them over the network. I don't know if this is possible in your case, but such decoupling provides a significant architectural advantage.
Related
I have a program that reads some data from USB, I would be running it as docker container (windows 10) on windows 10, I would like to know if it is possible to read the usb data when I run the program as container (windows container) where base operating system is windows 10.
Regards,
Amit
If a key goal of the process is to access hardware devices, it’s best to not run in a Docker container, which intentionally tries to hide details of the underlying hardware from you. That’s doubly true if you need to use Docker Toolbox, which adds an additional layer of virtual machine.
In addition to USB devices, I’d also avoid Docker if your goals include installing software on the host, reconfiguring or monitoring the host’s network interfaces, or accessing other hardware devices like sound or display configuration.
My question is: If you use Docker tool box (that is required for windows 10 home to run Docker) you are essentially using a virtual machine (vm)?
If you are using a vm already the only reason to use docker from that point is to save on many more multiple instances?
Meaning if you only want 1 extra (guest instance): you can have a vm. Though, with docker (toolbox on windows 10 home) you would have 1 vm and it runs docker?
The only way that is useful is if you want many more instances as in: 1 vm + 1 docker or + 1000 more dockers?
Or am I missing something?
Yes, docker toolbox uses Oracle VirtualBox cause Windows 7, 8, and Windows 10 home cannot use Hyper V. And yes, If you are using a VM already the only reason to use docker from that point is to save on many more multiple instances but it also allows easy backup and deployment. But you are losing a decent amount of memory when running a VM and then even more when you are running docker.
So although Docker CE will tell you your Windows doesn't support Hyper-V, this isn't always the case (if you check in System Info you might have Hyper-V enabled, if you're on an Insider build or many builds on GPU computers after Anniversary update then you probably have Hyper-V on Windows 10 Home). There are a few workarounds until the Docker team addresses this issue.
You could use Docker from inside WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Microsoft claims WSL accesses everything directly without Hyper-V so this should be theoretically at the same speed. Of course you can't use your GPU at all because of limitations with GPU passthrough on WSL, which you can ask to be resolved here.
You can also use Docker Toolbox as the other answer stated with Virtualbox, but this will be inherently much slower as you're virtualizing a container inside a virtualized container. You should be able to theoretically get GPU support through this, as well as other features e.g. GUI that you wouldn't be able to with WSL.
To answer the "usefulness" portion of the question:
It's also useful if you run code on a server, but need to develop/debug/update it. You want to test it locally, but to make sure the environment in which it executes is the same (to avoid unexpected, environment specific behavior), you use Docker both locally and on the server. In such a case, even though it's slow, I'll spin up a VM on my W10 Home laptop and run Docker in it.
The greatest feature of the Windows 10 Home May 2020 Update is Windows Subsystem for Linus 2. You can docker in it without the need for a complete virtual machine as in Virtual Box.
Install Docker Desktop that it will automatically indentify WSL2.
I'm on Windows 10 using Docker for Windows. Also, I have a container which originates FROM microsoft/windowsservercore. I have an USB device attached and want to pass it to that container.
What I found so far:
Under Linux you got --device=/dev/.., but how can I accomplish this under Windows?
Michael Friis wrote on 2017-07-07 that this is currently not possible. However, this comment states that it is.
So my questions are:
Is it currently possible to pass an USB device from a Windows Host into a Windows Docker container?
If yes, what is the correct syntax?
If not, when approximately can we expect this feature?
You cannot directly pass USB to the container. Either you have to run Docker as a VM or use USB/IP (where the USB data is transferred as IP packets). But there will be a delay in the second method.
I spent a day trying to figure out this problem, unfortunately there is no way to passthru USB devices to Windows containers as for now (Sep 2022).
Hyper-V doesn't support USB Passthru per se. While USB-IP seems like a viable solution, it requires installing custom drivers (usually self-signed), which is not support with Windows containers.
USB passthrough is currently not supported with Windows for Docker as of November 2017:
Docker for Windows USB Support
There is a way to pass USB through to Docker for Desktop running on windows. If the docker engine is running using WSL2 (Settings -> General -> Use the WSL 2 based engine) then you can attach a usb device using the usbipd libraries.
Details on USBIPD library and download:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb
I went into Command Prompt and typed in:
usbipd wsl list
Found the USB device that I wanted available in my docker container and then attached it in usbipd using the command:
usbipd wsl attach --busid <bus-id>
In the docker compose script I have:
devices:
- /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0
Which is where the usb device is being seen when I go into the container and go to /dev I see that ttyUSB0 is listed.
I can now use that USB device.. the trick is that the device needs to be attached using the usbipd command before the container starts or you will need to restart the containers for the container OS to see everything.
If you have that devices statement in your compose you might fine to attach and detach using usbipd and it just works since it would take the ttyUSB0 each time.
I would like to run a GPU enabled app (Gazebo) inside a docker container on my MacBook Pro.
I seemed to me, through my research, that about a year ago, Docker released a native Docker app for MacOS.
Before that, Docker used to spawn an entire Linux VM and run the container on top of it.
Now, it apparently uses some native hypervisor framework, making it more optimized and closer to the hardware, changing entirely Docker's approach to containerization on a Mac.
All this is not very clear to me and I am not sure of everything I stated.
Is it now possible to use my macbook pro's GPU from a docker container, and, if yes, how ?
The command line I'm using right now, which works for regular X11 apps but not GPU-enabled apps like Gazebo is:
xhost +
docker run -it -e DISPLAY=$ip:0 -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix image_name bash
There's still a virtual machine involved.
Docker for Mac uses a virtualization layer called XHyve. It's a lot thinner and more lightweight than VirtualBox or such (emulates fewer peripherals), but it's still virtualization.
PCI passthrough is (theoretically) possible, but you can't pass through your laptop's main GPU and still use it.
Hardware with an IOMMU (and yes, your MacBook Pro has an Intel chipset with such support) can allow a virtualized environment direct access to PCI hardware.
However, you can't cede control of a piece of hardware to a VM and still use that hardware from the host. (Some high-end server network cards work around this by having multiple PCI endpoints, so the host and each guest gets a different endpoint to talk to).
So -- you could get an external Thunderbolt-attached GPU, and it might work... in the future.
The underlying support in Xhyve isn't there yet (as of this mid-2017 writing), and even on KVM (used by a lot of folks doing pioneering work here), there are only limited reports of success (with a specific video card -- the Radeon HD 5850).
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I was reading a nice question about docker - answer has overview of docker implementation details. I was wondering if anything like this is possible to do on Windows platform.
Do Windows alternatives for Docker exist?
Is it theoretically possible to use other (Windows based) components to build it?
Update1:
Slightly related question (sandboxing): Is there a lightweight, programmable Sandbox API for the Windows platform?
Update2::
For info how to install docker on windows (unrelated) - official docs has great instructions how to set up the environment by using boot2docker VM.
You can run docker in a virtual machine.
New Update
Vagrant has now integrated docker support. It can be used as provider or as provisioner. Here are some useful links.
Feature Preview: Docker-Based Development Environments
Vagrant Docs: Docker Provisioner
Vagrant Docs: Docker Provider
Old Update
As seanf pointed out in a comment below, Vagrant support was dropped. Instead they point to boot2docker:
boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core
Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely
from RAM, weighs ~24MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).
Old answer
The official docker documentation contains a small guide to install docker inside a Vagrant box. Vagrant is a great vm management wrapper. The guide is for Mac/Linux, but you get the idea to do the same in Windows:
http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/vagrant/
This way you can share docker images across multiple systems with different operating systems.
If you're just searching for a way to deploy a pre-packaged set of applications in some sort of container for Windows, with registry and file access being virtualized but without using a full-blown virtual machine image, these (commercial) sandbox-like applications might be worth looking at:
Symantec Workspace Virtualization (get some ready-to-use packages from here)
Evalaze
Cameyo
BoxedApp
Edit: There's a new kid on the block, Spoon supports containers for Windows, and it actually looks very promising.
I have found that at least file system related functionality has Windows (7,8) already in place. One can use VHD files (virtual disks) for handling "images" concept in Docker. These image are used for virtual machine but can be created/attached/used directly by Windows too:
diskpart
DISKPART> create vdisk file=c:\base-image.vhd maximum=200 type=expandable
New image can be layered on top of base image:
DISKPART> create vdisk file=c:\image-2.vhd parent=c:\base-image.vhd
See more information about managing virtual disks.
Unfortunately, process lightweight isolation/sandboxing is probably not possible (at least not simple), although some methods do exists (http://www.sandboxie.com/, Native Client in Google Chrome ...)
Microsoft is working on their own Hyper-V Container that is similar to Docker - Azure also supports the Docker infrastructure.
That aside, it's hard to give precise alternatives but on the Windows side we've had App-V for quite a long time which virtualises and sand-boxes applications so they can be run or streamed without being actually installed on a specific system. I've never meddled with it but it seems to be able to run as a standalone client without any need of the intricate server infrastructure usually involved for anything Microsoft.
From another perspective the disk image format used by Windows (VHD) supports standard differencing so you can easily run many virtual machines from a single read-only OS image where each virtual machine have a tiny write image to handle the differences. These are still fullblown virtual machines though.
I currently don't know of any way to do the same thing on native windows as of right now.
I don't think the windows kernel was built for this sort of thing, so in order for it to be supported Microsoft would have to add the capabilities to the windows kernel. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.
The most common way for people to do something like this is to use a VM in windows that runs a Linux based OS, and running everything inside of that. You could also do the same thing using FreeBSD (Jails), and Solaris (zones), if that is more your cup of tea. But Docker currently doesn't support FreeBSD or Solaris, so you will need to use the native tools for those.
Now you can run docker natively on windows
See http://docs.master.dockerproject.com/installation/windows/
And
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/16/docker-client-for-windows-is-now-available?Ocid=OutgoingPromotion_Social_TW_Azure_20150416_169251868&linkId=13596123
Starting in june 2016, Docker can be run on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization on Windows 10 hosts. This is now the preferred and "official" way to run Docker on Windows.
https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/windows/
Hyper-V is a Type-1-Hypervisor, meaning docker will run one layer closer to the host hardware and perform significantly faster than boot2docker (which uses VirtualBox, a Type-2-Hypervisor, running inside the host OS).
The performance benefit for docker has a downside too: Enabling Hyper-V will prevent hardware virtualization features for Type-2-Hypervisors, therefore existing VirtualBox images can not be used with VTx, and you might want to consider moving other virtualized OSes to Hyper-V as well.
Windows 7-8.1 hosts can still use boot2docker to run Docker containers, but the main development focus for Docker on Windows is the "new" Hyper-V-Docker.
Hyper-V is only on Windows Pro. Install it for £110.
Or simply install Vagrant, install VirtualBox, install GIT bash, then from your GIT bash terminal.
git clone git#github.com:danday74/vagrant-docker-skelly.git
cd vagrant-docker-skelly
vagrant up # takes approx 5 mins to create VM
vagrant ssh
docker -v
docker-compose -v
The Vagrantfile shows that:
1 - this is a Xenial VM with docker and compose installed on it
2 - Ports mapped from Host to the VM are 9900-9920
3 - The shared folder is shared from host to VM
Tweak this as desired.
I got tired fighting with a maven docker plugin so I figured I would be able to fake it. This is how:
Using boot2docker and the following bat file makes it look like you're running docker natively. Place it on your path.
#set SSH="C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\ssh.exe"
#set RUN_REMOTE='docker %*'
# %SSH% -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o LogLevel=quiet -p 2022 -i %HOMEPATH%/.ssh/id_boot2docker -tt docker#localhost %RUN_REMOTE%
The ssh.exe comes from the msys-git package which is bundled with boot2docker.
I'm pretty sure this solution have quite a few caveats, but it works pretty good for me.
Place this file on your path and bob's yer uncle.