Support for Archivematica deployments on ARM architecture?

[elohanlon]

Hello,

Is it currently possible to run Archivematica on an ARM-based architecture? And if not, is there a plan to support Archivematica deployments on ARM processors in the future? From what I'm seeing in the latest Archivematica docs (for version 1.17.0), it looks like only x86_64 is supported at this time, with setup steps documented for Rocky Linux 9 and Ubuntu 22.

Rocky Linux 9 is also available as an ARM distribution:
https://rockylinux.org/download

And there's an ARM distribution of Ubuntu 24:
https://ubuntu.com/download/server/arm

A couple of advantage of supporting ARM are:

• Enabling AWS EC2 deployments of Archivematica to run on more cost effective AWS Graviton EC2 instances (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/), which use the ARM architecture.
• Enabling users to run Archivematica in an ARM-based Linux VM on Macs that use Apple Silicon chips (M1, M2, M3, M4, etc.). While it's technically possible for Apple Silicon Macs run a VM that emulates the x86_64 architecture, it can be extremely slow (often unusably slow).

Thank you,
Eric

[sromkey]

Hi Eric, thanks for the inquiry. ARM architecture is not something that we're familiar with or have plans to deploy on internally, so if you could point us to what is needed in the code base to make it possible that would help this issue be potentially action-able in the future.

Alternatively if you're looking to share the idea with others in the community that might have a similar aim or experience, you could post to the user forum: https://groups.google.com/g/archivematica

[elohanlon]

Hi @sromkey. Thank you for your reply! I just checked out the user forum and found this similar post from October of 2023:

https://groups.google.com/g/archivematica/c/lmMBydmNv4A/m/NggT6dZlAAAJ

Would someone from the Archivematica development team be able to reply to that post?

Also, does anyone on the Archivematica development team do development on an M1, M2, M3, or M4 Mac? If so, one potential starting point would be confirming whether they've been able to successfully develop/run Archivematica on that type of machine.