Docker is not supported on 32-bit architecture. To check the architecture on your system, run the following command:

$ uname -i
x86_64

Docker is supported on kernel 3.8 or later. It has been back ported on some of the kernel 2.6, such as RHEL 6.5 and above. To check the kernel version, run the following command:

$ uname -r
3.18.7-200.fc21.x86_64

Running kernel should support an appropriate storage backend. Some of these are VFS, DeviceMapper, AUFS, Btrfs, and OverlayFS.

Mostly, the default storage backend or driver is devicemapper, which uses the device-mapper thin provisioning module to implement layers. It should be installed by default on the majority of Linux platforms. To check for device-mapper, you can run the following command:

$ grep device-mapper /proc/devices
253 device-mapper

In most distributions, AUFS would require a modified kernel.

Support for cgroups and namespaces are in kernel for sometime and should be enabled by default. To check for their presence, you can look at the corresponding configuration file of the kernel you are running. For example, on Fedora, I can do something like the following:

$ grep -i namespaces /boot/config-3.18.7-200.fc21.x86_64
CONFIG_NAMESPACES=y
$ grep -i cgroups /boot/config-3.18.7-200.fc21.x86_64
CONFIG_CGROUPS=y