Currently v16 can not be built in an emulated environment

[splitice]

This is due to https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1729

If you try and build for armv7 on x64 you will encounter this. v14 will build fine.

Also note: npm/cli#5743

[pipex]

Hey @splitice, sorry for the delayed response and thanks for reporting this. We have recently realized of this problem when trying to build a new version of balena-io-modules/node-systemd#11.

While this issue does not affect the publishing of new supervisor releases in the short term, as these are not built using emulation, it will affect us in the future. Since it doesn't seem that qemu will fix the issue soon enough, it is likely that we'll move the supervisor docker image from alpine (musl) to debian (libc) sometime in the next few months to deal with this.

[splitice]

@pipex It may be worth testing a new version of QEMU, supposedly the issue is fixed.

https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1729

I would be happy to do so if you could push a qemu build at https://github.com/balena-io/qemu/ compatible with balena-cli

[pipex]

I'll discuss internally about updating the qemu fork, but it will probably take some time.

If you want to test emulated builds, you can do it directly with Docker with docker build --platform <target> -f Dockerfile.template -t balena-supervisor .

This assumes that docker has updated their version of qemu too. I'll investigate that later

[pipex]

It seems docker has yet to update qemu https://docs.docker.com/desktop/release-notes/

[splitice]

Can confirm that you can sucessfully build and run node applications with the latest qemu (9.1.1) emulating armv7 on x64. Have not completely verified balena-supervisor or anything, but tests pass.

[pipex]

Thanks for testing @splitice, could you share the steps you used for testing? Did you run a VM or did you do it via docker for linux?

[splitice]

We have our own hardware thats running balena-os, and a fork of balena-supervisor to match. Its validated on that.

It also passes npm test on the build servers system and the docker target (target OS emulated with QEMU).

We havent completed our testing, only did basic testing on this version of balena supervisor as we intend to merge to latest release as part of this work (now unblocked due to QEMU fixes)