Getting Docker to run on Power8

Last Week-End, I wanted to play around with Docker on a Power8 processor. Unfortunately, there no “ready-to-use” build available (yet) and Go support is still quite rough. Anyway, I love challenges and the process was eased a lot by the work of Dave Cheney from Canonical who did the hard work of porting the go command line to Power8 and IBM’s who is working with Docker to bring necessary fixes to gccgo.

Power8 is the name of a 64bits RISC processor micro-architecture of the same family as the G5 for example. This was the processor powering the venerable Mac G5. It is extremely parallel with up to 8 threads per core. This makes it especially good at running databases. Notably, Stewart Smith tuned MySQL 7 to get up to 1M request per seconds. This is just amazing!

Docker is a tool helping developers to build, ship and run code anywhere just like containers helps shipping anything anywhere. It is increasingly used in production to cleanly isolate processes on a same physical machine without the overhead of a Virtual Machine.

So, let’s get started. My goal was to get docker running and, if possible the latest version (it turns out it actually is the latest version). The goal was not to make it the shiniest way. That’s for later.