arm support for tidyverse, verse, geospatial?

[jpvelez]

Container image name

rocker/tidyverse, rocker/verse, rocker/geospatial

Container image digest

No response

What operating system related to this question?

Linux

System information

No response

Question

Hi folks,

Rocker is totally amazing; thank you so much for all your hard work! We're a climate think tank that mostly uses R but also occasionally python, and we all run apple-silicon macs.

Our current image looks like this:

FROM rocker/rstudio:4.3.3

# Adds tidyverse packages & devtools
RUN /rocker_scripts/install_tidyverse.sh

# Adds geospatial packages
# required by geojsonsf package
RUN R -e 'install.packages("jsonify")'
RUN /rocker_scripts/install_geospatial.sh

# Adds python and jupyter
RUN /rocker_scripts/install_python.sh
RUN /rocker_scripts/install_jupyter.sh
# Put python venv on PATH
RUN export PATH="/opt/venv/bin:$PATH"
# Install python3 kernel for quarto
RUN pip install ipykernel
RUN pip install --upgrade pip

# Adds quarto
RUN /rocker_scripts/install_quarto.sh latest

# Install light-weight tex distribution
RUN curl -sL "https://yihui.org/tinytex/install-bin-unix.sh" | sh

In other words, we use the rocker install scripts to essentially recreate rocker/geospatial with python installed. We do this because currently, rocker's arm support seems to stop at rocker/rstudio.

Is there any chance of supporting arm throughout the stack? With apple silicon macs becoming more common, I think a lot of folks would find this very useful!

[eitsupi]

Is there any chance of supporting arm throughout the stack?

The current problem is that some R packages such as arrow and duckdb take a long time to build. See #144.

Build times may be reduced when P3M starts providing arm64 binaries or when the arm64 runner is available on GitHub Actions (end of 2024).

[benz0li]

Is there any chance of supporting arm throughout the stack?

The current problem is that some R packages such as arrow and duckdb take a long time to build. See #144.

Build times may be reduced when P3M starts providing arm64 binaries or when the arm64 runner is available on GitHub Actions (end of 2024).

@jpvelez Until then, have a look at b-data's/my multi-arch (linux/amd64, linux/arm64/v8) JupyterLab R docker stack which includes RStudio for R versions ≥ 4.4.0.

[Jeadie]

Build times may be reduced when P3M starts providing arm64 binaries or when the arm64 runner is available on GitHub Actions (end of 2024).

#830 (comment)

ARM runners on GH actions are now in GA btw.
https://github.blog/changelog/2024-09-03-github-actions-arm64-linux-and-windows-runners-are-now-generally-available/

[benz0li]

Build times may be reduced when P3M starts providing arm64 binaries or when the arm64 runner is available on GitHub Actions (end of 2024).

#830 (comment)

ARM runners on GH actions are now in GA btw. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-09-03-github-actions-arm64-linux-and-windows-runners-are-now-generally-available/

Only for Team and Enterprise Cloud plans – not for the general public.

[falquaddoomi]

FYI, there are public arm64 runners available now: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-01-16-linux-arm64-hosted-runners-now-available-for-free-in-public-repositories-public-preview/.

[jpvelez]

We would still love to see arm support all the way up to rocker/geospatial.. we would be dedicated users!

[jflournoy]

So, one think you can do is build the rocker containers locally and use those. It will build them for you platform assuming that the FROM whatever/whatever is available for the platform. You may have to go back a few levels and build up from there, replacing FROM rocker/whatever with FROM your_local_image but it's not a huge burden if you really want the functionality. That said, it took me way to long to realize this.

The first step is cloning https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker-versioned2 and building the images as specified in dockerfiles/.

[nandishns]

Hi @eitsupi
Not able to run rocker/tidyverse:4.4.2 on macOS Apple Silicon but runs on macOS Intel
Is there a solution for the issue I raised : Issue
Should we look around different version?

[eitsupi]

Not able to run rocker/tidyverse:4.4.2 on macOS Apple Silicon but runs on macOS Intel
Is there a solution for the issue I raised : Issue
Should we look around different version?

Please use amd64 emulation, or use images have arm64 version like rocker/r-ver / rocker/rstudio instead.

[spencer-scw]

FYI, there are public arm64 runners available now: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-01-16-linux-arm64-hosted-runners-now-available-for-free-in-public-repositories-public-preview/.

Any plans to incorporate these runners in the near future? Or should we stick with local builds for now?

[eddelbuettel]

FYI the rocker/r2u stack (which is non-overlapping with r-ver) now supports arm64:

• initial blog post here (and I need to post a follow-up)
• stated in the normal README and r2u website
• which also lists an rstudio image under 'contributed' in the docker section
• the basic rocker/r2u image for noble has arm64 and amd64 tags

[eitsupi]

Any plans to incorporate these runners in the near future? Or should we stick with local builds for now?

The workflow file needs to be rewritten and I hope to do that at some point but I don't know when (#901).
The current workflow is not good but it is working and I have no motivation to do it anytime soon.

If someone could do that, it would be greatly appreciated.