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Building multi-platform images

⚡ For building multi-platform images with docker buildx, see the docker buildx documentation.

BuildKit provides built-in support for building multi-platform by setting a comma-separated list of platform specifiers as platform option.

buildctl build \
  --frontend dockerfile.v0 \
  --opt platform=linux/amd64,linux/arm64 \
  --output type=image,name=docker.io/username/image,push=true \
  ...

When your build needs to run a binary for architecture that is not supported natively by your host, it gets executed using a QEMU user-mode emulator. You do not need to set up QEMU manually in most cases.

Troubleshooting

Error exec user process caused: exec format error

You may face an error like exec user process caused: exec format error, mostly when you are using a third-party package of BuildKit that lacks buildkit-qemu-* binaries.

In such a case, you have to download the official binary release of BuildKit from https://github.com/moby/buildkit/releases , and install the buildkit-qemu-* binaries in the release archive into the $PATH of the host.

You may also face exec format error when the container contains mix of binaries for multiple architectures.

In such a case, you have to register QEMU into /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc so that the kernel can execute foreign binaries using QEMU.

QEMU is registered into /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc by default on Docker Desktop. On other environments, the common way to register QEMU is to use tonistiigi/binfmt Docker image.

docker run --privileged --rm tonistiigi/binfmt --install all

See also tonistiigi/binfmt documentation.

Builds are very slow through emulation

Running binaries made for a different architecture through a software emulation layer is much slower than running binaries natively. Therefore this approach is not recommended for CPU intensive tasks like compiling binaries. It is provided as a simple solution to build existing Dockerfiles and usually works well for common tasks like installing packages and running scripts. To get native performance for compilation steps you should modify your Dockerfile to perform cross-compilation using predefined platform ARGs. Learn more from https://medium.com/@tonistiigi/faster-multi-platform-builds-dockerfile-cross-compilation-guide-part-1-ec087c719eaf . You can also use xx project to add cross-compilation toolchains into Dockerfiles with minimal changes.

Docker Buildx also supports multi-node builders where single image can be built with multiple machines that each build components for their native architectures.