[Steem on RPi] How to Build steem for ARM64

I @etainclub am the developer of the PLAY STEEM mobile apps.

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I successfully built the steemit/steem source for ARM64 which means steem witness node can be run on arm devices such as Raspberry Pi.

What I am trying now is to run a witness node on RPi 4B (8gb).

If you have been following my posts, you know what I am doing.

Here I will explain how to build the steem source for arm64.

Then I will explain how to make a docker image to use.

What I did

I modified the steem source code, mainly

• removed equihash related codes
• removed stacktrace codes
• removed pow, pow2 codes

The modified version of source is in the repo:
https://github.com/EtainLove/steem/tree/0.23.x-arm64

There is a new branch, 0.23.x-arm64.

Failure

Here is the instruction as to how to build the steem.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/doc/building.md

I failed to build the steem on RPi 4. It seems it requires more CPU cores and RAM. The build process was stuck around 74%.

1st Success

I tried to build the steem source on more high-end ARM board, which is Nvidia AGX Xavier which has 8 CPU and 32GB RAM.

Here the os is Ubuntu 18.04, but I built the source in a docker container based on ubuntu 18.04.

The build processes were successful, so I could build both steemd and cli_wallet.

Wow!

Dockerfile to build

https://github.com/steemfans/steem-docker-ex
I modified @ety001's the docker file to make a docker image to run a witness node.

Here is the repo of the modified Dockerfile:
https://github.com/EtainLove/steem-docker-ex

The changes are

• base docker image for ARM64
• new steem repo for ARM64
  That's it.

Failed to build on Apple M1 (MacBook Air)

Even thought M1 chip is based on ARM and has 8 CPU cores and 16G ram, it failed to build the steem. It is also stuck around 74% of the building process.

Docker Buildx on AMD64 pc

I tried to use docker buildx on AMD64 linux pc which is able to build multi-architecture images such as one for ARM64.
The machine is Intel i7-8550U having 8 CPU cores and 16G RAM.

You need to install the latest docker. My docker version is 20.10.8, build 3967b7d, which includes buildx.

If you do the following, you will see this.

$ docker buildx ls
default default running linux/amd64, linux/386

It says, you cannot build arm64 image on your machine. You need to do something specially to build arm64 image on amd64 machine.

The detailed procedure is here:
https://medium.com/@artur.klauser/building-multi-architecture-docker-images-with-buildx-27d80f7e2408

In a nutshell, install the following docker image for qmenu-user-static

$ docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes

Then run the following again and check you see arm64 in the platform list.

$ docker buildx ls
default * docker                  
  default default         running linux/amd64, linux/386, linux/arm64, linux/riscv64, linux/ppc64le, linux/s390x, linux/arm/v7, linux/arm/v6

Now you can build arm64 image on your machine.

So let's get started!

1. download the steem-docker-ex repo from here:
   https://github.com/EtainLove/steem-docker-ex

2. move to the repo and do the following

$ cd dkr
$ docker buildx build --platform linux/arm64 -t steem:latest .

Don't forget the . at the end of the last command.

Then you will get steem:latest docker image for arm64 architecture!

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                   TAG                 IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
steem                        latest              e01a246b0d11   11 hours ago    1.55GB

$ docker inspect steem:latest
...
 "Architecture": "arm64",
        "Os": "linux",
        "Size": 1547274011,
        "VirtualSize": 1547274011,
        "GraphDriver": {
...

Copy the image to RPi4

Then what do do?

You need to copy the built docker image (steem:latest) to your RPi4.

1. First you have to save the image as a tar file

$ docker save steem:latest > steem-arm64.tar

1. Then, copy the resulting file to your RPi

$ scp steem-arm64.tar ubuntu@rpi (your rpi's ip)

1. Load the image from the file.
   This command should be done in RPi where the tar file exists

$ docker load < steem-arm64.tar

The you will see the image

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                   TAG                 IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
steem                        latest              e01a246b0d11   11 hours ago    1.55GB

Screenshots

Here are screenshots of working (no replay, syncing from the genesis).
I will use recent block_log to quickly sync. Wish me luck!

Thank You All

@ety001
@starlord28
@joviansummer
@steemchiller
@steem-agora

Resteem / Vote / Follow / Comment / Support

cc.
@steemcurator01
@steemitblog