Matter (WiFi and Thread) via Docker?

[wide marlin]

Wondering if it is still recommended to avoid using docker instances for Matter/Thread?

Python Matter Server seems quite stable and reliable now (at least on HA OS), so I'm curious if I can move to docker with less headaches than I experienced a year or so back. Does anyone have good experience with this working?

Also, what about Matter over Thread (using OTBR)? Anyone have success stories there? 😅

The reason I ask is because I'd like to use my Pi for other things, but it's currently running a separate HA instance just for the Matter and OTBR add-ons

[astral robin]

The problem is thread (and to some extent matter) rely on very specific IPv6 features. So it’s got less to do with the matter server and more to do with whether you want a hobby debugging IPv6 (you probably don’t).

HAOS has a patched network manager that handles configuring routes to thread border routers, and any other build of network manager will choke in the presence of multiple border routers.

On a typical server setup you won’t have NM, so you’ll need to figure out how to configure the kernel to achieve the same. There are some settings documented on the matter server page to help with that, but without kernel patches it won’t be as stable as HAOS.

And we speculated that systemd networkd doesn’t get it right either, though we haven’t really researched that.