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Show HN: Cross-Platform GitHub Action

76 points by JacobCarlborg 4y ago

I've created a GitHub Action for running commands on multiple platforms. This includes platforms that GitHub Actions don't natively support. It currently supports FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. OpenBSD can run on x86-64 and ARM64, the other operating systems run on x86-64. Some of the features that are supported include: * Multiple operating system with one single action * Multiple versions of each operating system * Allows to use default shell or Bash shell * Low boot overhead * Fast execution * Runs on both macOS and Linux runners Compared to similar solutions like https://github.com/vmactions/freebsd-vm https://github.com/vmactions/freebsd-vm, the boot time is around a fifth and the full execution time for the same job is around half of freebsd-vm (last time I tried). The readme contains more information about how it all works under the hood.

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elcritch 4y ago
awesome! This looks easier than setting up cross compilers for each platform.
- JacobCarlborg 4y ago
  And you can run tests, not just compile.
adobrawy 4y ago
I previously tried to use Docker `docker/setup-qemu-action@v2` and `docker/setup-buildx-action@v2` for this purpose (see that example https://github.com/docker/build-push-action#git-context https://github.com/docker/build-push-action#git-context). Thanks to buildkit, platform switching works transparently. However, building on ARM via QEMU on GitHub Actions is terribly slow (something like 5 times more), which is hard to accept. Therefore, full of hope, I am waiting for GitHub Actions to make cloud runners available on ARM, because it is a blocker for the implementation of Graviton on the AWS environment for us. For a while, the blocker in GitHub Actions for providing ARM support was that Azure doesn't have ARM support. In this way, the Azure cloud offering may determine the habits of AWS consumers.
- saurik 4y ago
  Why do you need to build on ARM to target ARM? I support ARM and I just build on x86_64.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    At $dayjob we build packages of our software for a bunch of Linux distros, which means the software has to be compiled individually for each distro to get external dependencies right. Some of those distros like the RHEL 7 family don't support cross-compilation, so we run them in QEMU.
    - saurik 4y ago
      You just need a sysroot for that distribution... you actually don't want to compile ON that distribution as it makes having a consistent and modern/working toolchain a lot more difficult. Notably, I compile for CentOS 6 (ancient, right?) on whatever the latest version of Ubuntu is--using the most recent versions of clang and rust and whatever--and simply build my sysroot using this trivial script. https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid/blob/6958658c2596aca75ed20d5f3de2c79f539352d4/env/sys-centos6.sh https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid/blob/6958658c25... (You can do this in some sense even easier using Docker--though in other senses it is a lot more complex as now you need docker--if you are into that sort of thing. You don't run the compiler in docker: you just install the dependency packages and then docker export the filesystem as your sysroot.) Using this script and clang I can actually compile to target CentOS 6 on macOS (and I get the exact same binary if I use a consistent version of clang; I actually have a GitHub action that verifies that I reproduce the same binary compiling on both macOS and Ubuntu).
      - Arnavion 4y ago
        >You just need a sysroot for that distribution... you actually don't want to compile ON that distribution We compile in a Docker container of the distro. It's the same concept as having a sysroot. >as it makes having a consistent toolchain a lot more difficult. >using the most recent versions of clang and rust and whatever The external dependencies I mentioned are libraries like glibc or openssl, where you want to use the distro version. Similarly the packages should be consistent with what the users of the distro would build themselves if they used rpmbuild / debbuild / whatever. The toolchain not being consistent across distros is the point. Also, none of this is relevant to cross-compiling for ARM. As I said, RHEL 7 doesn't have a cross compiler - specifically it has gcc but not glibc, because the cross compiler is only meant for compiling the kernel.

76 points by JacobCarlborg 4y ago

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elcritch 4y ago

awesome! This looks easier than setting up cross compilers for each platform.

JacobCarlborg 4y ago
And you can run tests, not just compile.

adobrawy 4y ago

I previously tried to use Docker `docker/setup-qemu-action@v2` and `docker/setup-buildx-action@v2` for this purpose (see that example https://github.com/docker/build-push-action#git-context https://github.com/docker/build-push-action#git-context). Thanks to buildkit, platform switching works transparently. However, building on ARM via QEMU on GitHub Actions is terribly slow (something like 5 times more), which is hard to accept. Therefore, full of hope, I am waiting for GitHub Actions to make cloud runners available on ARM, because it is a blocker for the implementation of Graviton on the AWS environment for us. For a while, the blocker in GitHub Actions for providing ARM support was that Azure doesn't have ARM support. In this way, the Azure cloud offering may determine the habits of AWS consumers.

saurik 4y ago
Why do you need to build on ARM to target ARM? I support ARM and I just build on x86_64.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  At $dayjob we build packages of our software for a bunch of Linux distros, which means the software has to be compiled individually for each distro to get external dependencies right. Some of those distros like the RHEL 7 family don't support cross-compilation, so we run them in QEMU.
  - saurik 4y ago
    You just need a sysroot for that distribution... you actually don't want to compile ON that distribution as it makes having a consistent and modern/working toolchain a lot more difficult. Notably, I compile for CentOS 6 (ancient, right?) on whatever the latest version of Ubuntu is--using the most recent versions of clang and rust and whatever--and simply build my sysroot using this trivial script. https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid/blob/6958658c2596aca75ed20d5f3de2c79f539352d4/env/sys-centos6.sh https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid/blob/6958658c25... (You can do this in some sense even easier using Docker--though in other senses it is a lot more complex as now you need docker--if you are into that sort of thing. You don't run the compiler in docker: you just install the dependency packages and then docker export the filesystem as your sysroot.) Using this script and clang I can actually compile to target CentOS 6 on macOS (and I get the exact same binary if I use a consistent version of clang; I actually have a GitHub action that verifies that I reproduce the same binary compiling on both macOS and Ubuntu).
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      >You just need a sysroot for that distribution... you actually don't want to compile ON that distribution We compile in a Docker container of the distro. It's the same concept as having a sysroot. >as it makes having a consistent toolchain a lot more difficult. >using the most recent versions of clang and rust and whatever The external dependencies I mentioned are libraries like glibc or openssl, where you want to use the distro version. Similarly the packages should be consistent with what the users of the distro would build themselves if they used rpmbuild / debbuild / whatever. The toolchain not being consistent across distros is the point. Also, none of this is relevant to cross-compiling for ARM. As I said, RHEL 7 doesn't have a cross compiler - specifically it has gcc but not glibc, because the cross compiler is only meant for compiling the kernel.