[discussion] Authoring charms using an ARM Box

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Hi All,

I’ve been experimenting with developing and deploying charms on an ARM box (it’s an M1 Mac, but I think that what I write here would apply to any ARM based Chromebook, or a theoretical jump box in an ARM cloud).

Has anyone else been doing so? What has your experience been like? (I’ll leave my own answers to these questions below.)

~ Pen Gale

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Here’s my specific office setup:

  • Macbook Air and Mac Mini, both M1 based.
  • Multipass installed on the Macs so that I can easily spin up Ubuntu VMs.
  • Ubuntu Server installed on a small form factor Amd64 based computer, which I access over my local network (or via a secure tunnel that I can use while traveling).
  • An lxd cluster on the Amd64 box, which I have access to from the lxc client on my Arm boxen.

I’ve found myself working more from a remote session on the Amd64 server than locally on one of the Macs. This is a pretty typical DevOps setup, and part of why I like it is simply the convenience of working from a byobu session on the server as I switch between my laptop and desktop. But there are some papercuts that prevent me from being able to change my workflow if I wanted to.

What works well:

  • The juju client generally works well, both run natively from homebrew, and run in a multipass vm. I do have to pass --constraints arch=amd64 when bootstrapping an AWS controller, but that’s a one time inconvenience. After that, I can deploy and operate a cloud without issue.
  • Registering, publishing, and releasing charms with charmcraft works well. (Again, this applies to both the homebrew version and the snap running in a vm.)
  • Multipass & LXD work well, just in general! I think that these are two of Canonical’s best projects, and I really enjoy using them.

What doesn’t work well:

  • charmcraft pack. It builds the Arm64 version of the charm, which I can’t then deploy to AWS, or my lxd cluster.
  • juju deploy to the Amd64 lxd cluster from a client on an Arm box. The Juju CLI sees a mismatch between the architecture on the Ubuntu server and the Arm box that is running the client, and I wasn’t able to fix this with constraints. (I think that it’s because the lxd cluster looks like a local cluster to Juju, which invokes a separate check.)
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