ARM64 Support

[extremeshok]

I have extensive experience with docker on arm, so before I get to work on this, has anyone got mailcow-dockerized ported or running on arm ?

Did a quick search through the repo and I do not see any references to arm.

Does the repo owner have any issues against arm support being added ?

Thanks

[mkuron]

A Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough memory. You need around 1GB if you disable ClamAV or 2GB if you don’t. Recent Odroid models should be sufficiently equipped though.

Please give it a try and open a pull request if it works out. You‘ll need to swap out the base images and use arm instead of amd64 repositories where available and compile yourself where not. Just don’t duplicate all the Dockerfiles as that would create a maintenance nightmare.

[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.

[MatthiasLohr]

@extremeshok Did anything happen here?

[David91919]

RAM issue on RPI is solved by now, would be great to see MC on RPI

[andryyy]

RAM is/was the smallest problem.
Maintenance is another, but the biggest problem is missing software for ARM.

I won't maintain mailcow on ARM, but feel free to port it and create a PR etc. - I think SOGo won't work reliable on ARM though.

[Braintelligence]

Some people even have issues with 4GB RAM if they use ClamAV and SOLR, so I wouldn't say that RPi4 would have none at all.

[Adorfer]

Until ARM-based 1U servers (with decent amount of RAM) become largely availabe at reasonable cost, ARM is not a suitable platform for mailservers on (small) enterprise level.

[bolet]

I have the mailcow stack running on armhf (odroid hc1, 8-core, 2gb), with, as expected, the usual resource hungry services disabled. It consumes less than 1gb, and I plan to run it on a (small) swarm for better resilience (with glusterfs as persistent storage). I'd argue that arm is a perfect platform for small traffic servers, which is my case.

The major part was rebasing debian/strecth-slim and ubuntu/bionic services on debian/buster-slim (the original distros were lacking armhf versions of some required packages). The other part was building mariadb:10.3, which also resulted in rebasing on debian/buster-slim. I believe the rebase on a common distro would benefit the consistency of the project.

Anyway, I'd be glad to share the patch if anyone is still interested.

[Adorfer]

offereing "state of the art" anti-spam and FTS are the key features of mailcow (and to offer it as a real alternative to hosting at gmail/M365 etc).
getting rid of that sounds like offering a modding/patch for a semi-truck getting rid of the hook and any lockable doors. Of course it's still a truck, but does not fit in most use cases.

[bolet]

Let's not be dictators! What about letting users decide how they want to configure mailcow? Isn't it one of the freedoms permitted by "free software"? :-)

I'll personally be happy to enable all the features when I switch to a higher end (arm64 based) server, but until then I still prefer using mailcow stripped from a few features than configuring a mail server from scratch (which is what I've been running for about 20 years).

[luckyluc74]

@bolet Would be great, if you could share the patch for mailcow stack for armhf. And I have to agree with you that there are users that are very interested to see mailcow stack running on armhf/aarch64, i am one of those users. I am currently Running 3 raspberry pi 4 (4GB) in swarm and would be nice to run arm version of the mailcow stack on it.

Very recently Ubuntu released version 19.10 with raspberry pi 4 support ( aarch64) . Would be great to also see a aarch64 version of mailcow.

[bolet]

@luckyluc74 Here is the patch : buster+arm.zip

Sogo image from mailcow runs but is broken because it still pulls amd64 code (I keep getting 502 errors).

This project builds sogo from sources and is a good starting point. But then I found out that debian:buster includes pretty recent (4.0.7) Sogo packages, so here is my patch to this last project.

All pieces seem to work now, but I haven't yet taken the time to put them all together. I'll keep this bug posted as I move on, but feel free to help :-)

[luckyluc74]

@bolet thank you for sharing the patch and extra info. That SOHO is not working is ok for me, because I am going to use Roundcube instead of SOHO anyway.