QEMU-based NetBSD docker images

Run NetBSD in a docker container (Emulated/virtualized x86_64 using QEMU).

All images have KVM-enabled QEMU, which will be enabled if the docker engine supports it and you are running the container with --device=/dev/kvm.

Available at Docker hub as madworx/netbsd.

Usage

Run a specific command in NetBSD

$ docker run --rm -it madworx/netbsd:8.0-x86_64 uname -a
NetBSD netbsd 8.0 NetBSD 8.0 (GENERIC) #0: Tue Jul 17 14:59:51 UTC 2018  mkrepro@mkrepro.NetBSD.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC amd64
$ 

Start in background, connect via ssh.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
$ docker run --rm -d --device=/dev/kvm -e "SSH_PUBKEY=$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)" -p 2222:22 --name netbsd madworx/netbsd:8.0-x86_64
$ ssh -p 2222 root@localhost
NetBSD ?.? (UNKNOWN)

Welcome to NetBSD!

We recommend that you create a non-root account and use su(1) for root access.
netbsd# 

or using ssh-agent:

$ docker run --rm -d --device=/dev/kvm -e "SSH_PUBKEY=$(ssh-add -L)" -p 2222:22 --name netbsd madworx/netbsd:8.0-x86_64
$ ssh -p 2222 root@localhost
NetBSD ?.? (UNKNOWN)

Welcome to NetBSD!

We recommend that you create a non-root account and use su(1) for root access.
netbsd# 

There are more options for customizing user accounts, mapping your host OS home directory into the NetBSD system etc. Check the docker-entrypoint.sh for details, or even better, document it and do a PR towards this project. :-)

FAQ

Why is it slow?

If you feel that the container is slow in starting/responding, or you are getting the message "Warning: Lacking KVM support - slower(!) emulation will be used." upon startup, it means that you are either not exposing KVM to your container (--device=/dev/kvm when invoking docker run), or your operating system doesn't support KVM.

Not having support for KVM might be due to that you are running your Docker engine inside a virtual machine and that your host doesn't have support for nested virtualization.

For instance, when running a QEMU virtual machine under physical hardware, it is entirely possible to run this image with KVM support. (Which is the setup for the main development environment for this image).

What's up with the "-x86_64" suffix to the docker tag?

Since we are using QEMU to emulate a target system, the "-x86_64" suffix serves to indicate which target system we are emulating.

On a x86_64 host, with KVM support, this is the most efficient (and preferred) way to run this image.

When running without KVM support, other target architectures supported by QEMU may be more efficient, but this is not something that has been tried out yet. (Feel free to try it out and submit a PR!)

Source

Source code is hosted on GitHub.

Contributions

Any and all contributions are welcome in form of pull requests.

Author

Martin Kjellstrand [martin.kjellstrand@madworx.se]