Recent Docker changes in Fedora

Lokesh, the docker-io package maintainer at Fedora, does a damn good job at keeping it up to date. I think it’s a good time to see what changed over the last weeks in the Docker-Fedora world.

Why Docker is still not available in Fedora?

Simple answer

There are some technical issues to overcome :)

Longer answer

The most important blocker is lack of AUFS support in the kernel (upstream as well as Fedora’s and RHEL’s). Alex Larsson is working on a replacement for AUFS using devicemapper. You can read more about this work in a nice blog post where Alex is covering this area.

If you’re interested in the actual code, please look at the dm branch in the official Docker GitHub repo.

Not yet in the official repos

At least not for Fedora 19 and 20. In Rawhide we do have a docker-io package avaialable, but Rawhide is intended for testing, and this is what we do now with the docker-io package. Additionally we agreed with upstream to not push Docker to Fedora repos before the 0.7.0 release. This is very closely related to Alex’s work on devicemapper. We do not want to make avialable half-backed solutions.

Please be patient.

Updated repo
Today I've updated my repository. It contains the latest 0.7-0.13.dm version of docker-io package.

But if you really want to get your hands dirty with the latest version - use my repository. You can of course help with testing and by reporting bugs you see, we appreciate it.

Only 64 bit

This is not a Fedora choice, but it’s forced by upstream. Docker currently works only on 64 bit architectures, so there won’t be any build for other archs (including i386 and arm), at least for now. I’m not sure where the root of this problem lies, but I’ll do some research over then next few days.

This is a quite big issue, since it technically prevents us from adding Docker to Fedora, since all packages should be available on all supported architectures.

I hope at that should is the key word here.

Changes

Some other important changes made from 0.6.3-2.devicemapper to 0.7-0.13.dm.

  1. Networking issues when accessing servers from an instance are now resolved. Appropriate iptables rules are now created when starting the docker service.

  2. The docker -v commands prints now correct version information.

  3. If you’re using zsh - you have now completion enabled!

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