Running Cross-Architecture Containers

For many reasons, it is desirable to build and run containers for one CPU architecture (e.g. x86_64) on another CPU architecture (e.g. Arm64).

Emulation Environment

One solution would be to use an emulation environment using the QEMU emulator and Docker. Using QEMU, binfmt_misc and the registration scripts via the multiarch/qemu-user-static project, we can run containers built for either Arm64 or POWER architectures on x86_64 servers or workstations.

Installing QEMU

Install the qemu, binfmt-support, and qemu-user-static packages. The binfmt-support contains scripts to register binary formats with the kernel using the binfmt_misc module; and the qemu-user-static package registers binary formats that emulators can handle.

$ sudo apt-get install -y qemu \
   && binfmt-support \
   && qemu-user-static

Run the multiarch/qemu-user-static container to register:

$ sudo docker run --rm --privileged \
   multiarch/qemu-user-static \
   --reset \
   -p yes

Now, verify that the binfmt entries were registered on the system:

$ update-binfmts --display

...
qemu-aarch64 (enabled):
  package = qemu-user-static
     type = magic
   offset = 0
    magic = \x7f\x45\x4c\x46\x02\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\xb7\x00
     mask = \xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xff\xff\xff
 interpreter = /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static
   detector =
...

Running Containers

The community maintains a number of Docker containers on DockerHub under arm64v8. Without an emulator, if you try running an arm64 Alpine container on x86_64, you will observe a format error from Docker.

This can be seen in the example below:

$ uname -m
x86_64

$ sudo docker run --rm arm64v8/alpine uname -m

standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "exec format error"

After installing the QEMU emulator and registering:

$ sudo docker run --rm arm64v8/alpine uname -m

aarch64