LibreELEC inside a docker container?

I’ve decided it’s time to consolidate my myriad SBCs down to a single platform (actually, my wife has decided this for me ).

I’d like to containerise everything on this one box to keep it all isolated. Writing Dockerfiles to migrate my other services (OpenVPN, bind, etc) has been easy. I left the LibreELEC box until last because I knew it would be the most difficult.

I’d prefer to run LE inside a container and not use it as the ‘host’ OS. Some of the other containers contain sensitive information and if a vulnerability in LE exposed them, that would be... bad. Running LE in its own container means I can drop most capabilities and re-map the root user to something less privileged.

I realise I can just run Kodi itself in a container (there are already a few working examples, using both GBM and X11), but doing that means I lose all the optimisations that make LibreELEC so great.

So... has anyone looked at running LE inside a container before? Are there any blockers that make this impossible?

Thanks. I’d anticipated the showstoppers to be related to dtoverlays or kernel models or something similar. I hadn’t even considered the packaging of LE.

I certainly wouldn’t expect official support for a container-based install. I’d be happy to contribute back if I get something working though. You’d have to admit there are some similarities between LE’s design goals and the docker deployment model; they’re both conceptually a minimal, immutable base layer with a thin read-write area layered on top.

Thanks for the suggestion. Running it in a VM would be easier in the sense the project already produces an OVA so, yeah, maybe that’s a starting point for now.

Having said that, a Docker container should actually be both simpler and faster, as it provides proper bare metal access to the hardware (networking is the only components that’s truly abstracted). It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get LE to fit into a container in the first place.

I know the LE project uses VMs for testing, but I’m not sure how usable that can be as a front-end on a low-power system. Even if the GPU and storage are passed through, you’re still dealing with the overhead of a hypervisor and various layers of virtualization/paravirtualization.

Anyways, thanks for all the feedback. I will report back on how I go.