arm64 (aarch64) capabitlity to run - which components hold us back from that?

[bugsyb]

Which components hold back BBB to be compiled for arm64 (aarch64)?
The arm64 systems might be quite suitable for small deployments, i.e. 2-4 users at max in parallel (just single private conference).
The idea is to have such private system which 98% of time does nothing and arm architecture sounds like the best choice.
The 8GB of ram is available on even Pi 4. Interestingly enough the Jitsi team managed to get their project working on arm64/pi4 and would be great if BBB could be made available too (dreaming about docker option).

Running amd64 unit on idle just for BBB is not the best option (private/family type of server).

[vlasov01]

Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS will no longer be supported by April 30, 2021. Any work related to BBB port to aarch64 should be based on BBB 2.3. And it is still in development.

Actually you can run quite big workloads on AWS Graviton2 arm64 based Amazon EC2. For example, c6g.16xlarge has 64 cores with 128GB of RAM. AWS claims that they offer up to 40% better price performance over comparable x86 based EC2 instances.

[basisbit]

There are still a couple of issues for manually building Kurento for arm64 target. Additonally, Kurento does not officially support arm64 target. The BigBlueButton project has very limited amounts of developers with spare free time and there are many more important issues.

So, if you want to get BBB to run on arm64 devices, you'll probably have to figure out stuff yourself and spend quite some time for manually compiling and installing various dependencies. If you get it to work, please feel free to document how you managed to do it and what your testing results are.

[vlasov01]

@basisbit Thank you!
Do you know if there are other dependencies to be resolved in addition to Kurento?

[basisbit]

Docker, Libreoffice, FreeSWITCH, gstreamer, ffmpeg, Tomcat, Scala build tools, Java, Python, Bash, Ruby, Groovy all support arm64 usually, so I do not know of other dependencies that would make it impossible to target arm64 systems when using bbb 2.3.x. However, as I said, you'll have to figure out building all the various dependencies and components yourself. I'd suggest you to wait a few more months before spending any time on this, at least until the new build/packaging system is published which is currently work-in-progress.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[antobinary]

I am tagging this for 2.5 but we'll see how far we get.

[msuhels]

not working in 2.5 release as well.

[dreamflasher]

Just tried to install via docker, got the following error:

WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested
exec /usr/local/bin/dockerize: exec format error

Would love to install BBB on an oracle free instance and this needs arm64 support.

The previously linked Kurento arm64 issues seem to be resolved?: https://github.com/orgs/Kurento/projects/7#card-46688518

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[monomycelium]

Has there been any progress on this?

[ffdixon]

Yes.

We are working on removing Kurento from the build (has a workaround for ARM compiling, but not supported directly by the project). We are working to replace Kurento with https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-recorder.

We are working to remove Meteor from the build, which as of this writing still hasn't merge in support for ARM in Meteor 3.0. We'll be replacing Meteor using GraphQL + https://hasura.io/.

Will we have ARM support out-of-the-box for BigBlueButton 3.0, not yet as Meteor will still be there. But once we remove Meteor and Kurento, the rest of our dependencies should all compile for ARM.

[nautilux2]

@ffdixon I saw that the PR merged. How is this going? I can't wait to run it on ARM! 😄