Works on Arm News, Week 38 (September 22, 2017)
Works on ARM news is written and edited by Ed Vielmetti at Packet. It comes out weekly on Fridays on Twitter's @worksonarm account and via Github and Gitbook. Subscription details are at the bottom of this issue.
In this issue
- Moving the Works on Arm News repository
- Docker official images are now multi-platform (Docker blog)
- Work in progress: Official multiarch images for Alpine Linux
- New Works on Arm website improvements
- Call for proposals for Works on Arm infrastructure access
- Report from Open Source Summit
- Report from Moby Summit
- Report from Mesoscon
- Next week: Linaro Connect
Moving the Works on Arm News repository
The plan in progress is to move the repository from the personal Github account it's on now to a Works on Arm organizational account, ideally without breaking anything.
- http://github.com/vielmetti/worksonarm-news - old
- http://github.com/worksonarm/news - new
Docker official images are now multi-platform (Docker blog)
From an article on the Docker weblog written by Michael Friis:
This past week, Docker rolled out a big update to our Official Images to make them multi-platform aware. Now, when you run docker run hello-world, Docker CE and EE will pull and run the correct hello-world image whether that’s for x86-64 Linux, Windows, ARM, IBM Z mainframes or any other system where Docker runs. With Docker rapidly adding support for additional operating systems (like Windows) and CPU architectures (like IBM Z) this is an important UX improvement.
By using a script provided as a Docker image by Phil Estes of IBM, mquery, I was able to inventory the top 140 "official images" in the system. Of these, 44 are already available as multi-arch capable images that support the arm64/linux platform. I'll be keeping track of that count as time goes forward to assess progress.
- https://blog.docker.com/2017/09/docker-official-images-now-multi-platform/
- https://github.com/estesp/mquery
Work in progress: Official multiarch images for Alpine Linux
One of the popular operating system base images for Docker is Alpine Linux, which provides a very small and functional system to use in base containers. Work is in progress to build multiarch Alpine, taking the work to date that already supports arm64.
From Michael Friis again:
Because so many of our official images rely on Alpine, we're really looking forward to this update. Please let us know if there's any help we can offer. @tianon has led the rest of the multi-arch effort and would be available to assist if that's useful. 👍 4 ❤️ 3
New Works on Arm website improvements
The Works on Arm website that supports this newsletter has had a number of improvements released over the past few weeks. It's now possible to subscribe to a newsfeed of the newsletter, and entries for many packages have been brought up to date.
We're currently tracking 32 different software packages, operating system distributions, and programming languages that offer support for arm64 in some fashion. You know and I know that that number is really much larger, but also that some systems have work left to be done to get first-class support for Arm. One of the goals in coming months is to expand out coverage of the ecosystem and validate and verify more major components.
Does your favorite _ work on Arm? Look for the logo, and if you don't see it, drop me a note to explore and update.
Call for proposals for Works on Arm infrastructure access
As part of the support for Works on Arm announced by Arm last week, we are taking proposals for projects that are looking for support for test, validation, and especially CI/CD on arm64.
Please see the issues list in the Works on Arm cluster repository for details. This week's proposals include
- Container Linux components (etcd, mantle, rkt) (Geoff Levand)
- Docker official container builds (Tianon Gravi)
- Kubernetes end-to-end testing (Lucas Käldström)
- OCaml build and CI (Anil Madhavapeddy)
- OpenJDK Java builds from Adopt OpenJDK (Tim Ellison, George Adams, IBM UK)
Looking forward to seeing your proposal!
- https://github.com/worksonarm/cluster
- https://github.com/worksonarm/cluster/issues
Report from Open Source Summit
Three days in Los Angeles for Open Source Summit North America. Aaron Welch, Ben Holton, and Ed Vielmetti (your editor) were there for Packet. I spent my time bouncing back and forth between the Packet booth and the Arm booth at the show.
We had a Qualcomm Centriq 2400 server main board at the booth, and greeted a long list of show attendees who were interested in Packet's bare metal server offerings.
Report from Moby Summit
Full day in Los Angeles for Docker's Moby Summit. Good discussion included reports on Linuxkit booting on arm64 as well as the announcement (above) on multi-architecture support for containers in Docker Hub. I was in for the morning and lunch part of the series, then off to Mesoscon.
Report from Mesoscon
Two full days in Los Angeles for Mesoscon. Showed off the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 board, and talked to a number of folks who were interested in tackling finishing the port of Mesos to Arm. I gave at talk late in the day Friday on our efforts, “One Ring to Bind Them” - Packet, Qualcomm, & Mesos: A Window into the Development of the Armv8 Ecosystem.
Slides for the talk are available.
Next week: Linaro Connect
Ed Vielmetti and Aaron Welch of Packet will be at Linaro Connect in San Francisco. Aaron is keynoting on Wednesday, and we'll be there for Arm Data Center Day. Hope to see you there.
Works on ARM News is released weekly on Fridays. Follow @worksonarm on Twitter for the weekly link, or follow the worksonarm-news project on Github for notifications. Email to [email protected] if you'd like a direct email.