20 Apr 2024

Setting up Orbstack to build multi-platform container Images

Mohamed Muhannad

It’s been a few months since I’ve switched to using Orbstack as an alternative to Docker Desktop. Main reason being that I wanted to take advantage of their improved speed on MacOS and the ability to create Linux machines as well. The team has shared a comparison sheet which may help you decide if it’s worth the switch.

Issues building or running container images that need Intel CPU architecture

Recently, I was working on a project, where the container images had to be built with support for Intel CPU (x86_64/amd64). When trying to build the image, I got the following error:

$ docker build --platform linux/amd64 -t lambda-image .

# output snipped

---
 > [build-base 2/4] RUN corepack enable:
0.077 Fatal glibc error: CPU does not support x86-64-v2
------
Dockerfile:12
--------------------

# output snipped

ERROR: failed to solve: process "/bin/sh -c corepack enable" did not complete successfully: exit code: 127

The same error message Fatal glibc error: CPU does not support x86-64-v2 was shown when trying to run any image with docker run..., that only had Intel CPU images available.

Enabling support for Intel CPU emulation

Going through the Orbstack Docs, it mentioned that it uses Rosetta under the hood to support multi-architectures.

To do check the Orbstack configuration you can check the Orbstack configuration to make sure it uses Rosetta. On my install, I noticed that this was disabled.

$ orb config show

cpu: 10
docker.node_name: orbstack
docker.set_context: true
k8s.enable: false
k8s.expose_services: false
machine.docker.username: muhannad
memory_mib: 8192
mount_hide_shared: false
network.https: true
network_bridge: true
network_proxy: auto
rosetta: false
setup.use_admin: true
ssh.expose_port: false

Turns out you can easily enable it to use Rosetta using the following commands:

$ orb config set rosetta true
Restart OrbStack with "orb stop" to apply changes.

# restart Orbstack
$ orb stop && orb start

Now Orbstack is able to run Intel CPU based images without any issue.

Hope this post was helpful to those trying to work with multi-architecture images using Orbstack. Let me know on X any interesting way you use Orbstack.