Docker in gVisor

Docker is a platform designed to help developers build, share, and run container applications.

In gVisor, all basic docker commands should function as expected. The host network driver and the bridge network driver are tested and supported.

Supported Docker Versions

Limitations

• dockerd inside gVisor needs to be executed with flags --iptables=false --ip6tables=false and additional network setup is needed, check images/basic/docker/start-dockerd.sh for reference. With iptables disabled, docker run --expose= does not expose the port; if a nested container needs to expose ports, inside gVisor use docker run --network=host.

Configuration Reference

To run Docker inside gVisor, you need to configure runsc and potentially the container storage depending on the Docker version.

runsc Flags (in /etc/docker/daemon.json)

To update your /etc/docker/daemon.json with the necessary runtimeArgs:

• --net-raw (Required for all Docker versions)
  • Enables raw sockets inside the sandbox. This is required for Docker’s networking to function.
• --allow-packet-socket-write (Required for Docker v28 and later)
  • Allows the sandbox to write to AF_PACKET sockets. This is necessary because dockerd (v28+) sends unsolicited ARP/NA requests when bringing up network interfaces.

  • Note: --allow-packet-socket-write allows sandboxed code to craft arbitrary network packets.

Example /etc/docker/daemon.json

{
    "runtimes": {
        "runsc": {
            "path": "/usr/local/bin/runsc",
            "runtimeArgs": [
                "--net-raw",
                "--allow-packet-socket-write"
            ]
        }
    }
}

If you have an existing entry for runsc (likely created by runsc install), edit the entry to add the "runtimeArgs" key and value.

Docker Storage Backend

Since version 29, Docker Engine defaults to using the containerd image store, which uses overlayfs for container root filesystems.

In nested container and sandbox environments where /var/lib/docker is already on an overlayfs mount, attempting to mount another overlayfs on top will fail because Linux does not permit overlay-on-overlay mounts (and gVisor currently requires tmpfs as an upper layer for overlayfs).

To run Docker in gVisor, you must use one of the following workarounds:

• Mount tmpfs at /var/lib/docker (Recommended): Mount a tmpfs filesystem at /var/lib/docker before starting the Docker daemon inside the sandbox so overlayfs can use tmpfs as its backing store.
• Disable containerd image store: Launch dockerd with --feature containerd-snapshotter=false to fall back to classic storage drivers.

See images/basic/docker/start-dockerd.sh as a reference implementation of how to handle these configurations at container startup.

How to run Docker in a gVisor container

First, prepare a container image with pre-installed Docker:

$ docker build -t docker-in-gvisor images/basic/docker

In a gVisor sandbox, Docker containers can be started with a set of capabilities as audit_write, chown, dac_override, fowner, fsetid, kill, mknod, net_bind_service, net_admin, net_raw, setfcap, setgid, setpcap, setuid, sys_admin, sys_chroot, sys_ptrace. For the simplicity, let’s start the sandbox with all capabilities:

# NOTE: `--cap-add` does *NOT* grant any host capabilities. See below.
$ docker run --runtime runsc -d --rm --cap-add all --name docker-in-gvisor docker-in-gvisor

NOTE: gVisor never runs with capabilities on the host Linux kernel, even when the above --cap-add all flag. This flag only controls the capabilities perceived by the in-sandbox application (in this case, the in-sandbox Docker daemon). This does not provide the sandboxed application, nor the gVisor sandbox itself, any host privileges.

Now, we can build and run Docker containers.

Let’s enter in the gvisor sandbox and run some docker commands:

docker exec -it docker-in-gvisor bash

$ mkdir whalesay && cd whalesay
$ cat > Dockerfile <<EOF
FROM ubuntu

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y cowsay curl
RUN mkdir -p /usr/share/cowsay/cows/
RUN curl -o /usr/share/cowsay/cows/docker.cow https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/whalesay/master/docker.cow
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/games/cowsay", "-f", "docker.cow"]
EOF
$ docker build -t whalesay .
....
Successfully tagged whalesay:latest
$ docker run -it --rm whalesay "Containers do not contain, but gVisor-s do!"
 _________________________________________
/ Containers do not contain, but gVisor-s \
\ do!                                     /
 -----------------------------------------
   \               ##         .
    \        ## ## ##        ==
          ## ## ## ##       ===
       /""""""""""""""""\___/ ===
  ~~~ {~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~ ~ /  ===- ~~~
       \______ o          __/
         \    \        __/
          \____\______/

In the sandbox, we can also run privileged containers by docker run -it --privileged --rm whalesay "Containers do not contain, but gVisor-s do!"