Docker on FreeBSD

Docker is available on FreeBSD. Yeah! Er. Hang on a minute – what’s the point.

People are talking about Docker a lot in the Linux world. It’s a system that allows a configured piece of software, together with all its ancillaries, to be in its own closed environment on any machine you choose. It’s not a VM – no emulation required. Well not much. It’s much more efficient that running multiple kernels on a hypervisor (as VirtualBox or VMWare).

But isn’t this one of the things Jails are for? Well, yes. It’s a kind of poor-man’s jail system for the poor deprived Linux users. Solaris and FreeBSD have been doing this kind of things for years with kernel support (i.e. out-of-the box and lot more efficiently).

So why should anyone be interested that FreeBSD also has Docker? Well, one of the things the Docker community has together is preconfigured applications you can just download and run. Given what a PITA it can be getting something running on a Linux box, which lacks a UNIX-like base system you can rely on, this does make sense. And running these pre-configured server applications on FreeBSD may be of interest, especially if you lack the in-house expertise to set them up yourself. But it won’t be all plain sailing. You need FreeBSD 11 (not yet released) to do it, together with the 64-bit Linux emulation library.

This does kind-of make sense. Stuff that’s currently Linux-only may be easier to deal with – I’m thinking Oracle here.

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