We're at the point where 98 of the top 100 downloaded packages in bioconda are ported or generic - but basically, they and their dependencies install on linux-aarch64. Or, of the 50 top starred nf-core pipelines, about 30 now have full linux-aarch64 support for all dependencies.

However, biocontainers appears to be not as healthy, so I'm opening this to take stock of where we are and what the direction needs to be for this project to support it healthily.

1. Although linux/arm64/v8 Architecture images #425 says there are now images when a bioconda-recipe has linux-aarch64, this doesn't correlate with what I can find when I search on quay.io.

• take bwa-mem2 for example, available in bioconda since November;
  • the current build for x86 is https://anaconda.org/bioconda/bwa-mem2/2.2.1/download/linux-64/bwa-mem2-2.2.1-he70b90d_8.tar.bz2
  • the current build for aarch64 is https://anaconda.org/bioconda/bwa-mem2/2.2.1/download/linux-aarch64/bwa-mem2-2.2.1-h1e84f2d_8.tar.bz2
  • on quay.io, searching for bwa-mem2 ( https://quay.io/repository/biocontainers/bwa-mem2?tab=tags ) yields only the x86 one:

Image

2. Various things like nf-core pipeline modules will explicitly ask for a specific package - but the specific package IDs are linux-x86_64, rather than multi-arch.

• those are going to all need to select on arch and then the package URL. A multi-arch container may make life easier for that, but at an effort cost for biocontainers.
• what should be done here.
• this is not unique to biocontainers - this is also an issue for galaxy project's singularity containers.

@ChristianKniep
@brainstorm