Guide for building multi-arch docker images

The Dockerfiles contained in the subdirectories build small-ish (~1Gi) base images that helps with some common PyTorch scenarios.

• lightning: 827Mi
• pyarrow: 1.01Gi (183Mi delta over lightning)
• transformers: 1.09Gi (8Mi delta over pyarrow)

Creating a docker buildx build config

To build for both amd64 and aarch4 (e.g. for running on Apple Silicon), you can use docker buildx.

First, you will need to create a buildx config, because the default one does not seem to work well for cross-platform builds. Here we name that config multiarch, but it can be named anything.

We have found that using the kubernetes driver works better than the default docker-container driver.

docker buildx create --name multiarch --use --driver kubernetes --driver-opt=qemu.install=true

The --use part tells buildx to set this as the default builder.

Note: We tell docker buildx to use qemu, so that the amd64 images can be built on an aarch64 host.

Warning: If your KUBECONFIG env var is colon-separated, this is something that docker buildx apparently does not support. You will need to run any docker buildx commands with e.g. KUBECONFIG=~/.kube/config, i.e. pointing it to a single filepath.

Starting a build

Now you should be able to build and push:

# whatever you need here, but note that the Dockerfiles
# may need to change, as you update these image names and tags
TAG=ghcr.io/project-codeflare/lightning:0.0.5

# build for aarch64 (arm64/v8) and amd64
PLATFORMS=linux/arm64/v8,linux/amd64

# note here that we build and push in one step; for some reason,
# buildx fails when only building
docker buildx build --push --platforms $PLATFORMS --tag $TAG .