Using a buildroot distro as a docker *host*

Question

I have an ARM based board that can only run a specific buildroot based distro provided by the manufacturer. I would like to try to run Docker on this board.

Any time I combine buildroot and docker in a Google search, I wind up getting pages that explain how to use buildroot to create a container, not how to alter buildroot to use it as the host.

Can anyone point me to some documentation?

Answer 1

The keyword you're missing is "engine".
It's the Docker Engine that allows the host OS to support Docker containers.

There's a submitted 3-part patch to add Docker Engine support to Buildroot.

[Buildroot] [PATCH v6 0/3] Add docker engine support

This series adds runc, docker-containerd, and docker-engine support.

Patch 1 adds runC, the new minimal CLI for running linux containers.
Patch 2 adds docker-containerd, the daemon and API for runC.
Patch 3 adds docker-engine, the cli and api for the Docker application
engine.