Support cross-architecture instances

[iainlane]

installed: 0.8.0-dev.273+g2a708f8 (935) 163MB classic

I was trying to debug an i386 snap build failure just now, and wanted to launch a VM to fiddle around in. On my amd64 machine I can run i386 images (and some arm64 machines can run armhf similarly). (Ignore that bit, it's semi-nonsense (it's relevant for containers) - any foreign arch should work if there's qemu support for it.) But multipass doesn't show me non-host-arch images:

laney@raleigh> multipass find
Image                   Aliases           Version          Description
snapcraft:core          core16            20190629         Snapcraft builder for Core 16
snapcraft:core18                          20190629         Snapcraft builder for Core 18
core                    core16            20190424         Ubuntu Core 16
core18                                    20190213         Ubuntu Core 18
16.04                   xenial            20190628         Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
18.04                   bionic,lts        20190627.1       Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
18.10                   cosmic            20190628         Ubuntu 18.10
19.04                   disco             20190628         Ubuntu 19.04
daily:19.10             devel,eoan        20190704         Ubuntu 19.10

and there's no --arch option hidden away in multipass launch --help either.

Taking inspiration from LXD. I'm thinking that if I could do multipass launch bionic/i386, that'd be sweet.

I'm going to be filing a similar request to snapcraft to allow something like snapcraft --arch=i386 to work. I don't know how snapcraft invokes multipass (sorry), but ideally it'd be possible for snapcraft to request instances for other arches once this issue is solved too.

[xypron]

The online help and the documentation should describe if multipass is meant to support non-host architectures.

[lunderhage]

This would be truly excellent!

[johalun]

How far do we think we are from having this capability?

[ChillarAnand]

If you are looking for a viable alternative for Mac M1, you can use https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for the time being.

[sebastianrothe]

If you are looking for a viable alternative for Mac M1, you can use https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for the time being.

You should also have a look at https://github.com/abiosoft/colima for a Docker-Desktop-like experience.

[sgandon]

any news on this request ?

[georgeliao]

@sgandon we have that in our plan and we will implement that at some point.

[RhettRautsaw]

Just adding to the chain to request this.. specifically support for x86_64 on an M1/M2 Mac.
Thank you all for making a great program otherwise.