Mailing List Archive

Docker images: Alpine and new architecture support
Hi everyone,

I just wanted to everyone that we have now closed two important tickets:
- https://github.com/varnish/docker-varnish/issues/2 (alpine support)
- https://github.com/varnish/docker-varnish/issues/12 (arm support)

In short, all images are now supported on amd64, arm32v7, arm64v8, i386,
ppc64le, and s390x. And on top of this, the "fresh" tags are also
accessible with an "-alpine" suffix (fresh-alpine, 6.6.1-alpine, etc.).

What you don't get, for now, is an alpine variant of the stable image as we
still need a couple of backports before it's viable.

The way images are built have changed quite a lot (they don't rely on
packagecloud anymore), and there could be a few quirks lying around, so
please give it a go and report anything odd on the usual bug tracker:
https://github.com/varnish/docker-varnish/issues

And I need to thank again @tianon and @yosifkit over at
https://github.com/docker-library/official-images for their help and
unending patience.

Cheers,

--
Guillaume Quintard
Re: Docker images: Alpine and new architecture support [ In reply to ]
On 8/6/21 02:59, Guillaume Quintard wrote:
>
> In short, all images are now supported on amd64, arm32v7, arm64v8, i386,
> ppc64le, and s390x. And on top of this, the "fresh" tags are also
> accessible with an "-alpine" suffix (fresh-alpine, 6.6.1-alpine, etc.).

Guillaume this is good news, thanks for this effort.

Can you (or anyone) share some info about how well Varnish performs with
musl libc?

I like the goals of the musl project, and I sure would like to get
Varnish to run on smaller images, but I've been reluctant to seriously
try it on alpine. Because I'm not sure how well optimized musl is
compared to the old standby glibc, and Varnish needs to perform well.

glibc's reputation is that it's been around for a long time, and has had
a lot of opportunities for performance improvement. On the other hand,
glibc bugs me sometimes by taking liberties with non-standard features.

musl aims for stronger standards compliance, but is much newer, which
has made me wonder if it could support the performance we like to get
from Varnish. But it's been a few years now, so maybe I shouldn't worry
about it.

Also, I recall that for a while the alpine build was unable to pass make
check. Is that working now?


Thanks again,
Geoff
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Re: Docker images: Alpine and new architecture support [ In reply to ]
Replying to all this time

On Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 08:48 Guillaume Quintard <guillaume.quintard@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 3:31 AM Geoff Simmons <geoff@uplex.de> wrote:
>
>> Can you (or anyone) share some info about how well Varnish performs with
>> musl libc?
>>
>
> Good question, and unfortunately, I don't have a good answer in return as
> I haven't benchmarked it, so feedback is more than welcome.
>
> What I can comment on is that musl is quite adamant about being standard
> and pure, so it will hopefully be more portable and will let compilers do
> more work. As you mentioned, we've had issues in the past compiling and
> testing with it, but it should be all behind us now:
> - there were some header issues that prevented us from compiling, but we
> fixed that a couple of years ago
> - libbacktrace isn't available on Alpine, which prompted the move to
> libunwind (can we make it the default now?)
> - it has help fix a few compiler warning issues lately
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Guillaume Quintard
>
>