Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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It would be slightly less convenient, but it probably wouldn’t affect your development capabilities so badly. Pretty much any Dockerfile that works on x86 should work on ARM. Linux runs totally fine on ARM. If anything, the worse problems are with Linux desktop and games software that assume ARM == embedded and attempt to use EGL and GLES.

There are, of course, many Docker repositories that lack ARM images, and you couldn’t use the exact same build locally as in production, but I think those are not actually huge, unresolvable issues. (The latter is straight up a non-issue with a good CD pipeline.)

Windows 10 also runs on ARM platforms, with the ability to transparently emulate Intel. I’m sure this is or will be usable inside of VMs even if dual booting is not an option.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...

Most linux desktops work fine on ARM chips FYI. GPUs in the ARM world are usually just for OpenGL used by video games.

Video decoding/encoding is handled by a VPU (not GPU), HDMI is handled by a separate HDMI PHY, and most of these components have mainline, libre kernel support if you use an Allwinner based single board computer.

Microsoft has started branding some Mali GPUs as DirectX 11 capable, though YMMV on using these features.

Sure, but many games and applications are hardcoded to use EGL and GLES (which is not always available for desktop ARM.) For example, I believe Qt4 makes the assumption that ARM = GLES.

> There are, of course, many Docker repositories that lack ARM images, and you couldn’t use the exact same build locally as in production, but I think those are not actually huge, unresolvable issues.

I'm not sure thats true. At the very least its going to suck for the first year as gaps are being filled, but those differences might matter too. I would hate to have to duplicate every single Dockerfile just because of this, as engineering orgs are typically heterogenous (win/lin/mac).

Should not need to duplicate the Dockerfiles; they should work as-is. The repositories may not contain aarch64 builds, but just like docker repos can contain windows container builds alongside linux, they can contain aarch64 alongside amd64, at the same URL, with the same tags, and in fact I think plenty of official images already have that.

Few images should need Dockerfile changes unless they are bootstrapping from scratch. People are already using Docker and Kubernetes on Raspberry Pi and other small ARM devices.

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