I have just signed up to use scaleway.com, a firm that is introducing quite a distinct product to the server market. Their servers are based on ARM processors, which in my view, are likely to be a rapidly growing trend in this sector given the lean, and energy efficient design of the ARM CPU.
But, a Virtualmin install gags due to the lack of ARM binary support. This may mean me having to search for an alternative that does work on ARM. Others will no doubt do the same.
It is very likely Virtualmin will need to acknowledge this emerging market before it starts to hemorrhage customers. What are your plans for supporting ARM and when might such support be available?
We haven’t received many requests to support ARM – actually, you’re only the second to request it, the first came in IRC earlier this week.
The issue there is that it requires a lot of time and effort to build and maintain a new architecture – so we’d need to make sure there’s sufficient demand for such a thing.
We’re going to discuss that at our next meeting… which was initially scheduled for today, but Jamie’s on vacation, so that should be next week
So we’ll be talking about that soon.
I can’t make any promises as to what we’ll support and when at this time, but we can certainly discuss it.
Of course, if anyone wishes to fund development of a new architecture, that’s absolutely something we could discuss and that would expedite such support.
It can be done manually but is a load of work and I still had some issues, sortable though I would have thought, but I really like the install script, I brought this up on IRC as the new project I had in mind is very promising.
How much funding help are we talking about here?
Surely VM on ARM servers would be another notch up for VM
I just cancelled my scaleway server as I only want VM on all my projects.
@kevanharding have you found a CP that easily installs yet? Not tried myself but those ARM servers look great.
So, I don’t currently have access to any ARM hardware, but it does look like I can emulate it reasonably easily.
Here’s what needs to happen to make Virtualmin run on ARM, assuming you’re running an ARM build of one of our supported distros (it’s really not much):
Build procmail-wrapper for ARM.
Build Apache for ARM (only needed for CentOS/RHEL/Scientific, which only has a beta build, I think).
Make repository for ARM.
Modify install.sh to detect ARM (it already has detection for i386 vs x86_64, so this isn’t huge).
You could run Virtualmin on ARM today, as long as you don’t need the advanced mail processing stuff (procmail-wrapper), and if you’re able to handle the manual process of configuring it (which is, admittedly very tedious, though less so lately, if you can get to a point where installing virtualmi-base is functional).
Small list of things; it shouldn’t take more than a week or so of my attention. But, I still have my hands full after the migration to Drupal 7.
So give me another week or two to sort out the remaining big issues with the new site; particularly handling renewals of old licenses, and upgrades of licenses in general. Then, I’ll tackle ARM. If someone wants to help…well, I wouldn’t turn down help. (Note the install script is now up on github. I’ll be cleaning it up some more and testing it soon…I’m not sure the one on github actually works, at the moment, as I made a bunch of cleanups based on shellcheck advice, and it may have broken things). And I need to polish up the virtualmin-base packages and get them into their own repos, as well. I’ll sort of consider adding ARM support to be one of the goals of this move of all installer related stuff into public github repos.
