ARM building support

[sr229]

This allows building for ARM using Travis's new Multiarch support. This will supersede ALL PRs I had for ARM support.

Resolves #35 and requires coder/nbin#25.

[code-asher]

Very cool. 🎉

[SpinningK]

I want to turn my Android phone to a server and code on my ipad. I check this PR every day👻

[mirsella]

me too @SpinningK, my rpi4. you can 1) activate notification when a new release is uploaded, and 2) you can also activate notification for all new message on this particular thread. hope it helps

[sr229]

Might need to trial out ARM builds first in my LKGR repo first before merging this so if anyone's interested I'll be releasing builds there first.

[Akarys42]

Hi, I hope this will be merged soon! @sr229 you said we can download build in your LKGR repo in the meantime, but I can't find it. Do you have any link please?

[sr229]

Hi, I hope this will be merged soon! @sr229 you said we can download build in your LKGR repo in the meantime, but I can't find it. Do you have any link please?

Right here chief. It'll take a while to run ARM builds though since we haven't built nbin to do package builds yet.

[SpinningK]

Any progress?

[deftdawg]

The Alpine Arm build failed because the environment is missing the libsecret-dev package... I'm in the process if trying to manually build this branch now.

[deftdawg]

On Android I can make it as far as yarn watch in the build instructions, but then gulp kills itself after exceeding the system file watch limits ENOSPC. Trying to yarn start it without having completed the compile also fails...

Is there another way to get it to compile without watching all the files for changes (I assume that's what yarn watch is doing)?

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to override the fs.inotify.max_user_watches value on a non-rooted Android device.

In any case, I'll try to build a Pi as well, if I get a chance. 😞

[code-asher]

@deftdawg You might have better luck with the build instructions (https://github.com/cdr/code-server#build) instead of the development instructions. You won't need yarn watch if you're just building.

[deftdawg]

@code-asher, I gave those instructions a try... modifying package.json to point at @sr229 's nbin package, but unfortunately, it fails to find nbin and I'm too much of a node noob to understand why.

These are my steps

git clone https://github.com/cdr/code-server.git
cd code-server
git checkout sr229/travis-arm
sed -ie 's=@coder/nbin": "^1.2.2=@coder/nbin": "github:sr229/nbin#sr229/travis-arm=' package.json
yarn build "1.39.2" "deftdawg-android-1.39.2"

And this is how yarn dies:

yarn run v1.16.0
$ yarn && yarn runner build 1.39.2 deftdawg-android-1.39.2
[1/4] Resolving packages...
[2/4] Fetching packages...
info fsevents@1.2.9: The platform "linux" is incompatible with this module.
info "fsevents@1.2.9" is an optional dependency and failed compatibility check. Excluding it from installation.
[3/4] Linking dependencies...
warning " > @coder/logger@1.1.8" has unmet peer dependency "@google-cloud/logging@^4.5.2".
warning "@coder/nbin > @coder/logger@1.1.11" has unmet peer dependency "@google-cloud/logging@^4.5.2".
[4/4] Building fresh packages...
success Saved lockfile.
$ cd ./scripts && node --max-old-space-size=32384 -r ts-node/register ./build.ts build 1.39.2 deftdawg-android-1.39.2
Error: Cannot find module '@coder/nbin'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:636:15)
    at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:562:25)
    at Module.require (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:692:17)
    at require (internal/modules/cjs/helpers.js:25:18)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/source/code-server/scripts/build.ts:1:1)
    at Module._compile (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:778:30)
    at Module.m._compile (/source/code-server/node_modules/ts-node/src/index.ts:493:23)
    at Module._extensions..js (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:789:10)
    at Object.require.extensions.(anonymous function) [as .ts] (/source/code-server/node_modules/ts-node/src/index.ts:496:12)
    at Module.load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:653:32)
error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.
error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.

[Merith-TK]

@deftdawg interesting, it just states that it is missing a dependancy, try installing that dependancy and try again?

[deftdawg]

@deftdawg interesting, it just states that it is missing a dependancy, try installing that dependancy and try again?

@Merith-TK yeah cool, like how?

I tried this:
npm install "github:sr229/nbin#sr229/travis-arm" --loglevel verbose
which installed after 64minutes on my phone, same error (both with and without -g global option).

I added:
"@google-cloud/logging": "^4.5.2",
to packages.json's devDependencies and that made the warning about cloud logging go away, but still can't find nbin

I tried adding
"@coder/nbin": "github:sr229/nbin#sr229/travis-arm",
to both dependencies and devDependencies in scripts/packages.json, however that had no effect.

Feel like this should be a very easy thing to solve, but I don't really know node very well and my google searches haven't turned up anything helpful... just stuff like rm -rf node_modules which I have already tried.

[sr229]

There isn't much change in my ARM branch so don't point it there, I'll be working on a experimental distribution format for a bit for ARM since compiling it for the architecture requires a custom gcc toolchain.

Not a pleasant experience but I'll get around it soon.

[code-asher]

@deftdawg yeah I'd recommend just building from master and not modifying anything. You should be able to just do something similar to this:

git clone https://github.com/cdr/code-server.git
cd code-server
yarn build "1.39.2" "android"
node ./build/code-server*/out/vs/server/main.js

So basically you'll just run the compiled JavaScript files with node. You won't be able to package into a binary since nbin doesn't support that architecture yet.

[Akarys42]

Here is the build output I get while doing sudo yarn build 1.39.2 arm after adding a lot of missing packages, still doesn’t work. Any fix for it?

[code-asher]

I think the build script swallows some error output. You could try running that command manually in the root VS Code directory and it might show you what's really going on: yarn gulp compile-extensions-build --max-old-space-size=32384.

[code-asher]

You can also run yarn in the root VS Code directory when there are missing dependencies, although there should only be missing dependencies if the build is cancelled while it's installing because then on the next run it sees that node_modules exists and doesn't try to install again. Actually I'll fix that right now so it always runs yarn.

[deftdawg]

@code-asher's fix commit is 015a99e...

I'll cherry pick it to @sr229 's arm branch and have another go at attempting to build this with nbin/master this time.

[code-asher]

@deftdawg this PR only changes the CI so there's no benefit in building against it locally. You could just build against master.

[deftdawg]

@code-asher my bad, I'll have a go against master then.

[Akarys42]

@code-asher I don’t really get more output with yarn gulp compile-extensions-build --max-old-space-size=32384 (I also tried yarn gulp compile-extensions-build)

[sr229]

@Akarys42 I was observing this behavior as well, along with a Illegal Instruction error. @coadler and I are gonna attempt it on a ARM64 VM and see if we can compile it.

[Akarys42]

Nice, let me know if you can manage to build it!

…

[deftdawg]

@Akarys42 I'm getting "SIGKILL" as well... best I can figure it is the OS killing yarn because max-old-space-size is set to 32GB on my 4GB RPi4 (exit code 137 is out of memory).

I'm going to try with setting --max-old-space-size to 3096 (3GB) in package.json and see if that helps.

[deftdawg]

Reducing max-old-space-size did not work.

I did however have success building it in a aarch64 alpine Docker container running under qemu-aarch64-static... The x86-64 host machine had 64GB of RAM and I estimate the build required 10GB of memory to complete.

The same machine only reported 2GB free with an arm Docker container, so will need to figure out how to get past that for an arm 32-bit build.

[mirsella]

@deftdawg make a 12GB swap can work ?

[code-asher]

If I recall correctly I attempted a build on an ARM64 VM and it passed once I updated Node to 10.15.1. Older versions of Node failed. The master branch currently targets 12.14.0 but I haven't used that to build on ARM64 yet so I can't confirm if it works.

[deftdawg]

@code-asher

Yarn complains about using node >8 or >11. For my successful build, I used Alpine 3.9 inside a Docker container with qemu-aarch64-static registered to build Master on an x86-64. Then I scp'ed the full code-server directory and started it on a Raspbery Pi 4 running aarch64.

Newer versions of Alpine didn't work inside of Docker on x86-64, node will fail to compile while QEMU spits up (alpinelinux/docker-alpine#48).

Screenshot of it running:

I'm not sure how we can get this built on Arm32v7 though, I think qemu-arm-static maybe has some 2GB memory limit or something on 32-bit... I searched for Arm 32 machines with lots of ram and the only one I could find is an older QNAP NAS w/ a Coretex-A15 and DDR3 ram slots for up to 16gb.

[sr229]

Closing since we found a better way now :3c