Library used on Linux image not found on M1 ARM64 image

Question

I want to create a Docker image in big sur (M1 chip) with the help of visual studio, but I get the following error :

Starting: "docker" exec -i 737ff06a8ab3 /bin/sh -c "ID=.; if [ -e /etc/os-release ]; then . /etc/os-release; fi; if [ $ID = alpine ] && [ -e /remote_debugger/linux-musl-x64/vsdbg ]; then VSDBGPATH=/remote_debugger/linux-musl-x64; else VSDBGPATH=/remote_debugger; fi; $VSDBGPATH/vsdbg --interpreter=vscode --interpreter=vscode"
Error from pipe program 'docker': qemu-x86_64: Could not open '/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2': No such file or directory

The first time it works correctly, but the second time the error occurs

how to resolve it

Answer 1

I ran into this issue when my Dockerfile specified a generic image name but installed linux/amd64 software. What occurs in this instance is that you will get an ARM64 (M1) base image (unless you specify a different --platform in your build call), which does not come pre-populated with x86 shared objects.

It will faithfully try to run the x86 (amd64) code through Docker's qemu hypervisor but discover it is missing some basic shared objects that must be architecture-specific.

What this means is that you need to call up your OS package manager and install the x86 shared object packages and make sure they are in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The error messages you see will tell you what you need to find.

In my case, using an arm64 image based on ubuntu/debian, I use the 'apt' package manager. In other OS's, you might use 'yum' or 'rpm'. Go to the web site for that OS (e.g. packages.debian.org) and search for your library dependencies in their packages, then specify that in your RUN call to build into the image.

For your error, you are likely looking for 'libc6'. Here's how I loaded it, which is an amd64 cross-compile package:

Example Dockerfile entries:

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y wget unzip
RUN apt-get install -y libc6-amd64-cross

RUN ln -s /usr/x86_64-linux-gnu/lib64/ /lib64

ENV LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/lib64:/usr/x86_64-linux-gnu/lib"

There may be other libraries you find missing, so you just have to step through it and resolve the missing shared objects.