[NIFI-9554] Support building and running NiFi on arm64/aarch64 platforms such as Apple Silicon M1 Macs

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.17.0
• Component/s: Tools and Build
• Labels: arm64
• Assignee: Kevin Doran
• Reporter: Kevin Doran
• Created: 07/Jan/22 18:17
• Updated: 19/Jul/22 16:53
• Resolved: 19/Jul/22 16:53

Description

Some development environments are transitioning to be based on arm64, such as Apple Silicon M1 Macs.
AWS is also offering arm-based EC2 instances which could be a good target platform for NiFi clusters.
Some target runtimes for MiNiFi Java also fall into this category, such as Raspberry Pi.

There are also some native arm64/aarch64 JVMs available that can run on these platforms without emulation.

Given this, it seems like a good time to adding support for building and running on arm64/aarch64 in addition to amd64/x86_64.

An initial bit of experimentation shows that the full Maven build fails using an arm64 JDK, but can succeed with a few changes. This ticket is to introduce changes that allow Apache NiFi and subprojects such as MiNiFi and Registry to build and run using a native arm64 JDKs.

Additionally, once this is achieved, add a CI build that targets arm64 platforms to prevent future changes that would break arm64 compatibility.

Issue Links

• blocks: NIFI-9177 Provide ARM64 docker Images for Apache Nifi
• is depended upon by: NIFI-10248 Setup CI jobs for arm64 platforms
• is related to: NIFI-7846 Supporting os.arch aarch64 issues
• is related to: NIFI-8322 build failed on AArch64, Fedora 33
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #60
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #5751