How to cross-release and upgrade?

Questions / Help
1

Hey guys,

I have thousands of arm64 based IoT devices in end users home running armbian (systemd based). And an elixir based agent.

The trouble is:

  1. I do the development on my x86 based linux (also I have m1pro based macos), How could I cross compile my code to armv8 binary?
  2. When I want an OTA for my agent, I have to download/extract the release directory and then call the systemd restart agent.service. Is it possible to compile my project into a single file to make upgrading process easier?
2

  1. Unfortunately elixir doesn’t have great cross compile tooling like golang has, but thanks to docker we don’t need great tooling to have an easy way to cross compile.
    Faster Multi-Platform Builds: Dockerfile Cross-Compilation Guide | Docker

  2. Yes, Bakeware — bakeware v0.2.4, but be aware that they claim that they aren’t production ready.

1 Like
3

Cross compilation is a hard topic because in most cases libraries that contain code that needs to be compiled natively have their custom Makefile, this shifts the responsibility to the developer of the library/codebase to ensure cross-compilation of the project.

If we talk about pure erlang/elixir code, it works out of the box on all platforms as long as you have the runtime compiled for the correct architecture.

4

Wow!

Bakeware seems great! Thank you!