CN Tips about skywalking-java-agent development for Apple Silicon users

[Leibnizhu]

I wrote some tips about skywalking-java-agent development for Apple Silicon users，in my blog (chinese):

https://leibnizhu.github.io/p/Skywalking-Java-Agent%E5%9C%A8M1%E8%8A%AF%E7%89%87MacOS%E4%B8%8B%E7%9A%84%E5%BC%80%E5%8F%91tips/

But I am not so sure how to let other developers in skywalking community know about it.

[wu-sheng]

Actually, if you want, you could submit a pull request to enhance the document of plugin test, even more, you could use maven's os-maven-plugin to make the containers support MacOS AARM. This should be more helpful

[wu-sheng]

Another option is, whether this createImageOptions could be set through shell -- parameter. If so, you could put these arguments on the test doc as a FAQ to guide users.
Once user doesn't have to change source codes to test on AARM, it would be good to host this solution as official.

[Leibnizhu]

thx, i would have a try.

[lujiajing1126]

Thanks for your tips. I think there are several steps we have to do in order to support arm64/v8,

1. Upgrade protobuf, grpc and related toolkits to have aarm64 support,
2. Update docker-maven-plugin to build platform-specific variant of tomcat and jvm containers.

These are covered in your blog. But actually they are not sufficient, for example,

1. For the MySQL scenarios, https://github.com/apache/skywalking-java/blob/main/test/plugin/scenarios/mysql-scenario/configuration.yml#L26, mysql:5.7 does not have arm64/v8 support. An alternative may be mariadb images.
2. For the Kafka related cases, https://github.com/apache/skywalking-java/blob/main/test/plugin/scenarios/kafka-scenario/configuration.yml#L31, neither zookeeper:3.4 nor bitnami/kafka images have arm64/v8 support. We have to replace them with zookeeper:3.4.13 and wurstmeister/kafka:2.12_2.2.1 respectively.
3. ... (pretty sure they must be other incompatible images and issues)

If we want to host all cases on arm64 machines, may be we can create an issue to track.

[wu-sheng]

I think the key point of this discussion is making the test framework run on AARM, rather than all cases. That is not required.
For example, MySQL and Zookeeper have versions not available on AARM, which is totally fine.