GitLab CI / U-Boot runner container

In order to have a reproducible and portable build environment for CI we use a container for building in. This means that developers can also reproduce the CI environment, to a large degree at least, locally. This file is located in the tools/docker directory.

The docker image supports both amd64 and arm64. Ensure that the buildx Docker CLI plugin is installed. This is often available in your distribution via the ‘docker-buildx’ or ‘docker-buildx-plugin’ package.

You will need a multi-platform container, otherwise this error is shown:

ERROR: Multi-platform build is not supported for the docker driver.
Switch to a different driver, or turn on the containerd image store, and try again.

You can add a simple one with:

sudodockerbuildxcreate--namemultiarch--driverdocker-container--use

This will result in a builder that will use QEMU for the non-native architectures request in a build. While both amd64 and arm64 happen in parallel, the non-native part will take considerably longer as it must use QEMU to emulate the foreign code. An alternative, if you have accesss to reasonably fast amd64 (i.e. 64-bit x86) and arm64 machines is:

sudodockerbuildxcreate--namemultiarch-multinode--nodelocalNode--bootstrap--use
sudodockerbuildxcreate--namemultiarch-multinode--append--noderemoteNode--bootstrapssh://user@host

And this will result in a builder named multiarch-multinode that will build each platform natively on each node.

To build the image yourself:

sudodockerbuildxbuild--platformlinux/arm64/v8,linux/amd64-tyour-namespace:your-tag.

Or to use an existing container

sudodockerpulltrini/u-boot-gitlab-ci-runner:jammy-20240227-14Mar2024