Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Docker

[Ben Hilburn]

Having almost no experience with Docker myself, I unfortunately don't have much in the way of worthwhile technical input on this.

That said, I really do want to encourage this conversation. Installation of GNU Radio on one machine can be a pain for many people, and doing it on many machines over a network can be extremely difficult. I'm very interested in what Docker could do for us in terms of accessibility and administration.

Cheers,

Ben

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 2:31 PM, Nicholas McCarthy <address@hidden> wrote:

Sorry I'm a few days late to the Docker party (and I don't have the original thread at hand).

Thanks, Stefan, for sharing your work.  I want to share something similar I worked up for my stack when Martin released pybombs2 and exposed me to the "deploy" function.  

https://hub.docker.com/r/namccart/pybombs

https://hub.docker.com/r/namccart/pybombs-dev

All the stuff is on github, including a grc docker using the local X11 setup (as Jonathan described) with this pybombs install image.

https://github.com/namccart/docker_grc.git

I think it would be really helpful for the GNU Radio project to support a standard, basic gnuradio docker install with uhd and grc enabled as well as an example or two to demonstrate sane ways to run OOT modules on top of that image.  As Ben mentioned, Docker seems like a pretty energy-efficient way to approach support for systems like Windows and OSX going forward.  Not having used boot2docker personally, I won't say that it's necessarily time to retire the live usb image, but I think Docker may evolve quickly into a pretty obvious replacement, if it hasn't already.  I also appreciate GNU Radio looking for ways to support users and potential users attempting to build and deploy applications that reach beyond the immediate environment of GNU Radio and its core devs.  

One problem we have to face, though, is image size.  I'm trying to tackle that problem by compressing the install for transactions over the wire and then uncompressing locally for applications (using pybombs2, of course).  This is all a little awkward for docker distribution, but lots of things in docker are a little awkward.  Developers could build on top by untarring the prefix, pybombs installing extra recipes (possibly custom recipes) and then using the deploy command again, all within the same Docker "RUN" section.  Locally, if you docker build applications beginning with the same commands to untar the image, then all applications can take advantage of that layer (you'll have to untar the base image only one time regardless of how many applications use the base image).  Alternatively, you can docker run with cmd or entry set to untar the image (and then, presumably, you'll want to commit the running container locally so you don't have to untar again).

Does anyone have a better idea for bringing image size down without making it impossible to build and deploy OOTs?  Those Bistromath images are pretty tiny... I haven't really looked into the Alpine base image, either.

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