Using Docker for building packages

Leverage multi-CPU architecture support

Docker brings multi-CPU architecture support:

Docker images can support multiple architectures, which means that a single image may contain variants for different architectures, and sometimes for different operating systems, such as Windows.

When running an image with multi-architecture support, docker will automatically select an image variant which matches your OS and architecture.

Most of the official images on Docker Hub provide a variety of architectures. For example, the busybox image supports amd64, arm32v5, arm32v6, arm32v7, arm64v8, i386, ppc64le and s390x.

Docker Desktop for Mac provides binfmt_misc multi-architecture support, which means you can run containers for different Linux architectures such as arm, mips, ppc64le and even s390x.

This does not require any special configuration in the container itself as it uses qemu-static from the Docker for Mac VM. Because of this, you can run an ARM container, like the arm32v7 or ppc64le variants of the busybox image.

– https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/multi-arch/

– https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#architectures-other-than-amd64

Hands-on

Emulating ARM:

docker run -it --rm arm32v7/debian:stretch-slim uname -a
docker run -it --rm balenalib/armv7hf-debian:stretch-build uname -a

Miscellaneous

• https://ownyourbits.com/2018/06/27/running-and-building-arm-docker-containers-in-x86/

• https://blog.hypriot.com/post/test-build-and-package-docker-for-arm-the-official-way/

• https://blog.hypriot.com/post/setup-simple-ci-pipeline-for-arm-images/

• https://www.balena.io/blog/building-arm-containers-on-any-x86-machine-even-dockerhub/

• https://www.ecliptik.com/Cross-Building-and-Running-Multi-Arch-Docker-Images/

• https://hub.docker.com/u/arm32v7/

• https://hub.docker.com/r/arm32v7/debian

• https://github.com/hypriot/arm-compose

• https://forums.docker.com/t/build-a-container-for-arm-architecture/34266

• https://hub.docker.com/r/budry/registry-arm/

• https://marina.io/

• https://hub.docker.com/r/resin/rpi-raspbian/

• https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/base-images/base-images/

• https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/base-images/devicetypes/

• https://hub.docker.com/r/balenalib/armv7hf-debian-python

• https://github.com/docker-library/official-images

• https://github.com/balena-io-library/official-images/tree/master/library

• https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage-build/

• https://medium.com/@tonistiigi/advanced-multi-stage-build-patterns-6f741b852fae

Non-Docker things

• https://github.com/debuerreotype/debuerreotype

• https://docs.armbian.com/Developer-Guide_Using-Vagrant/

• https://github.com/adafruit/ARM-toolchain-vagrant/blob/master/Vagrantfile

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34051322/is-there-a-vagrant-box-that-simulates-a-raspberry-pi

• https://github.com/twobitcircus/rpi-build-and-boot

• https://github.com/Asquera/raspberry-devbox

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Virtual_ARM_Linux_environment

• https://github.com/DieterReuter/qemu-arm-box