Hi,
I think I read somewhere (maybe the OpenElec forums but I don't remember exactly) that the 3.10 was just too old/hacked by AmLogic to support docker properly. Also it only exposes 1.6G of ram due to I think memory dedicated to the gpu (that I don't need personally as my box is headless, I prefer have the full 2G of ram for software).
I don't know about the gen of my Minix box, I'm not sure if there is a simple way for me to know?
I just reinstalled armbian using the 5.0 kernel, and I had some issues booting directly from the usb drive, what is working for me right now is having the boot partition on the sdcard and the rootfs on the usb drive. Also the otg port did work for me using a 2.5 usb hdd with the double power usb ports (data port on the otg adapter, power port on one of the other usb ports), but it doesn't seem to work using a powered 3.5 usb hdd adapter. I don't know if you somehow need to backfeed current to the otg port for it to work, or if it's an issues with the 5 kernel...
Anyway, if I were you and wanted to test step by step, I would:
- Grab a sdcard and try with flashing the latest balbes' image with 5.0.0-rc4 kernel (not on a usb drive, I had less issues booting from sdcards)
- See if it boots. Remember there's no gpu support so no video output, see with your router's dhcp allocations or a network scan (personally I use a network scan app on my android phone) to detect the ethernet IP and try to ssh to it (root/1234)
- Grab the 5.0.0 kernel sources, and the config file I attached (there's no dot in the filename I provided, add it)
- try to compile it, and install:
make -j 4 LOADADDR=0x00208000 uImage dtbs modules
sudo make modules_install
sudo make headers_install
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/uImage /boot
- reboot, see if it boots with the compiled 5.0.0 kernel. If it does you should be able to install docker
- from there you could play with migrating the rootfs partition to a usb drive. Remember that the boot process will look for a ext4 partition with the "ROOTFS" label. That's how you should be able to switch between the sdcards and usb drive rootfs partitions. What I did is that I flashed balbes' image on a usb drive, and removed the rootfs label from the sdcard partition (sudo e2label /dev/mmcblk0p2 "")
Also, the .config file I provided is clearly not optimized. I grabed a default one that includes lots of stuff for many boards and added the docker flags I needed. It clearly needs optimization as it include support for a lot of unnecessary bloat. But it works for me, I'll make some cleanup in the future if I have some time...
I hope that helps,