Docker Raspberry Pi OS for Arm Virtualised with QEMU

Docker images with a QEMU virtual machine emulating ARMv6 and running Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) for the armhf architecture.

Oversimplified diagram:

+-------------------------------+
|                               |
|  Docker Container             |
|                               |
|  +-------------------------+  |
|  |                         |  |
|  |  Raspberry Pi OS        |  |
|  |                         |  |
|  +-------------------------+  |
|  |                         |  |
|  |  QEMU Emulating ARMv6   |  |
|  |                         |  |
|  +-------------------------+  |
|                               |
+-------------------------------+
|                               |
|  PC Host OS                   |
|                               |
+-------------------------------+

These Docker images are built on top of the fantastic dockerpi project, all credit for the hard work goes to them. The main difference in this version is that the Raspberry Pi OS Lite image used has been updated to enable auto-login, SSH, and expand their filesystem size.

These changes make these images useful for things like running automated tests on CI, e.g. GitHub Actions.

How to use these images

The main image produced in this repository can be run with this command:

docker run -it ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:bullseye-latest

This will drop you into a bash session inside Raspberry Pi OS.

SSH

You can also launch an image with port forwarding and access it via SSH:

docker run -it -p 5022:5022 ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:bullseye-latest

• SSH port: 5022
• SSH username: pi
• SSH password: raspberry

Available Images

There are two main releases right now buster-latest and bullseye-latest:

ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:bullseye-latest

ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:buster-latest

Each Pi OS release has its own tag, including the OS release date in this format:

ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:buster-yyyy-mm-dd

There also is an additional tag on each release with the postfix mu in the tag name, which is an specialised image created specifically to include the Mu Editor dependencies pre-installed, which is used for CI tests on that project:

ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:buster-yyyy-mm-dd-mu

All images can be found here: https://github.com/carlosperate/docker-qemu-rpi-os/pkgs/container/qemu-rpi-os-lite

Releases

Each OS release is tracked and customised via the Raspberry Pi OS Custom Image repository, which then hosts the custom images in its releases page.

Older OS versions

Older versions of Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS have been tagged and published:

docker run -it ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:jessie-latest

docker run -it ghcr.io/carlosperate/qemu-rpi-os-lite:stretch-latest

Build and run this docker image from the repository

This information can be found in the dev-docs.md file.