AArch64/arm64 support?

[jdstroy]

Hello,

Would it be possible to build arm64 binary packages for Ubuntu 20.04? I see that the advice is to avoid distribution packaging, but binaries aren't on xpra.org for arm64/aarch64.

Thanks.

[totaam]

I don't have any experience building arm packages on x86_64, I would prefer using buildah since that's what the build scripts already use, but it's not clear to me how feasible that is.
https://buildroot.org/ seems to be another popular option.

[totaam]

Doing a v3.1.x build today on a PI model B for #3288: this took over 3 hours before it failed at the very end! 😠
So I ended up doing some experimental beta builds on the PI4, which you can find here:
https://xpra.org/beta/buster/main/binary-armhf/
https://xpra.org/beta/buster/main/binary-arm64/

But I can't do this by hand for every release, for every sub-arch and for every distro...

---

I'm going to have to play with buildah and try to understand exactly what this does:

buildah from --arch arm64 --name "fedora-35-arm64-build" fedora:35

[jdstroy]

If it helps, Oracle Cloud has no-cost ARM servers available for the public. They should be considerably faster than building on a Raspberry Pi.

Linux jean 5.11.0-1016-oracle #17~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 12 06:20:07 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

processor       : 3
BogoMIPS        : 50.00
Features        : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant     : 0x3
CPU part        : 0xd0c
CPU revision    : 1

(Incidentally, this is why I'm interested in builds for arm64; I'd like to use Xpra with audio, and the version downstream doesn't support that.)

[totaam]

It turns out that buildah does some magic and invokes qemu-aarch64-static when we create an --arch arm64 image.
From then on, all the build scripts just work the same.
Emulation is not super-fast on my old i7 CPU, but it does seem to emulate multiple cores and this is a lot better than running on a RPI. The key thing is that it can be fully automated just like the other builds.

The build scripts updates are here:
Xpra-org/repo-build-scripts@71f39e4

[jdstroy]

Awesome, thank you! I'm looking forward to trying xpra-4.x.x on AArch64!

[totaam]

There are beta packages for:

• Ubuntu Focal
• Ubuntu Hirsute
• Debian Bullseye
• Fedora 34

in the beta area: https://xpra.org/beta/

The following distros should be coming later:

• Fedora 35
• CentOS / RHEL 8

This required a number of changes and fixes to the build scripts:
Xpra-org/repo-build-scripts#3

@jdstroy / @rrthomas please let me know if those work for you so that I can close this ticket.

[rrthomas]

@totaam Sorry, I'm not sure why I subscribed to this issue! (I remember playing with xpra back in August, but that was to run Audacity conveniently via run_scaled on an x86_64 machine…)

[jdstroy]

Spectacular, thank you! I've upgraded to Xpra 4.3 on Ubuntu 20.04 on AArch64 and now I have remote audio.

[arrowd]

Just a note that FreeBSD 13 and 14 also have the binary Xpra package for AArch64.

[totaam]

As of now, we produce arm64 packages for:

• Fedora 34 and 35
• CentOS 8
• Ubuntu focal and hirsute
• Debian bullseye

More can be added easily enough:
https://github.com/Xpra-org/repo-build-scripts

[totaam]

For CUDA support: #3378.

[totaam]

For the record, making arm64 builds takes time, a lot of time. Even on powerful x86 hardware.
Building an updated Cython just took 23 hours.