Docker armv7 support

gcrk

Hello everyone!

I want to discuss the support for ARMv7/ARM32 docker images. A few versions ago we started providing them to allow people easily run the thing on raspberry pis and other SBCs. However, never Raspberry PI boards everything above RPi3) do have arm64 CPUs and in February 2022 Raspberry PI OS started supporting 64bit, too, which is now the default.

That being said, arm/v7 images are likely only used in edge cases and legacy systems these days and new setups should use them.

On the flip site, maintaining those images is a workload and requires diving deep into the details of our docker builds every few months. Most of the times our docker builds fail its because of the specific requirements of arm/v7 package builds. The other platforms usually don't cause issues.

With the constant growth of the RISC-V architecture, there is also a good reason to free some resources to support this platform. RISC-V is also way more open, there are even fully free (as in free speech) CPUs and this feels like it aligns much better with our values.

Considering all of this, I am in favor of dropping support for arm/v7 also known as arm32 after the 1.4.0 release. However, I might missed some important point, if thats the case, let me know!

JuniorJPDJ

Let's disable it in develop, it creates problems with all builds.

gcrk

JuniorJPDJ Let’s disable it in develop, it creates problems with all builds.

So you are in favor of the deprecation?

JuniorJPDJ And RISC-V is a bit problematic, as alpine doesn’t support it in stable until they get real server-grade machine to build the packages.

Its nothing I want to do now, its just something where we might run into issues at the beginning and having some resources to assign would help 🙂

JuniorJPDJ

And RISC-V is a bit problematic, as alpine doesn't support it in stable until they get real server-grade machine to build the packages.

Thovi98

Do you propose to drop support of armv7, only for the docker build, or to totally get rid of it? 🙂

If it's only the docker build, then no problem for me, but if you plan to deprecate armv7 totally, I first have to check with the Yunohost users, I think quite some of them run on armv7

gcrk

Thovi98 If it’s only the docker build, then no problem for me, but if you plan to deprecate armv7 totally, I first have to check with the Yunohost users, I think quite some of them run on armv7

Well, this is complicated. In the first place this discussion is only about not building the docker image for armv7 in the future. This wont have any direct effect to YH as far as I can tell. However, if we are honest, those docker builds are our only test bed for armv7, so I'd expect some issues not to be spotted early on, which means there might be more bugs YH users may experience. We would still fix them, but likely spot them later in the lifecycle of a release.

petitminion

if Raspberry support arm64 I think it's ok to plan a depreciation . But I would let some time pass and maybe communicate about this on mastodon ?

jooola

I think I already proposed this, but my idea didn't find enough traction amount Funkwhale devs.

I think alpine is a good base image for the docker build because it can really reduce the size of the image, but when it comes to platform support and stability, Debian is the way to go. If we want to support armv7, we might want to use Debian as base image.

So we could have the following images (I don't remember the exact image names):

funkwhale/api:1.4.0               => funkwhale/api:1.4.0-alpine-amd64

funkwhale/api:1.4.0-alpine        => funkwhale/api:1.4.0-alpine-amd64
funkwhale/api:1.4.0-alpine-amd64

funkwhale/api:1.4.0-debian        => funkwhale/api:1.4.0-debian-amd64
funkwhale/api:1.4.0-debian-amd64
funkwhale/api:1.4.0-debian-armv7

That said, I think we could also drop support for armv7

gcrk

jooola I think alpine is a good base image for the docker build because it can really reduce the size of the image, but when it comes to platform support and stability, Debian is the way to go. If we want to support armv7, we might want to use Debian as base image.

Back in the day when we went for Alpine, the major reason was that @JuniorJPDJ is somewhat involved there and this was a huge benefit in some cases. However, I agree that Debian is easier to handle in corner cases, eg armv7 support.

I would be in favor of additionally providing Debian-based images, however, we'd still lack pre-build wheels for armv7 and would need to build them in our Docker container, don't we? So I guess the potential for breaking updates would still remain. Am I missing something here?