An Overview on s390x Base Images

For s390x, quite a few options for base images are available on Docker Hub/Docker Store these days. They vary from enterprise environments over community distributions to minimal images. This post gives an overview on what is provided by various sources.

Docker CE for all distributions

The previous post mentioned that Docker provides CE packages for Ubuntu. For users of Debian, SLES, RHEL, Fedora, ClefOS, openSUSE, and Alpine, there is still an option to get the latest Docker CE version to their environment:

Docker 1.11.2 for RHEL 7 (and Ubuntu 16.04)

A new version of Docker is linked to from developerWorks. This is a bump to 1.11.2, built on/for RHEL 7.2 (which happens to be the version that Canonical also provides in universe for Ubuntu 16.04

Creating Base Images

In First Steps with Docker, we have used a fairly crude way to create initial base images. A minimalistic approach to come to a base image environment is to have only the necessary rpms installed through on-board tools. This assumes the system is enabled for accessing all packages online.

Inspired from https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/contrib/mkimage-yum.sh, this script works both for SLES 12 and RHEL 7: