Running minikube on outdated and unsupported platforms

[afbjorklund]

Running minikube requires amd64 for x86, and at least an armv7 (but preferrably arm64) for ARM...

It also requires 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of hard disk, which might not be available on the local machine.

But we could still offer minikube start and the kubernetes experience on these machines, for learning ?

Assuming that there is another computer available to run the actual cluster (but not the desktop interface)

#4733

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With the possibility of loading and building images in the cluster, and also running kubernetes client there*,
the lack of docker and kubectl is not really blocking. The client would only be used for editing files etc.

* #10843

This would allow running minikube on i586 i686 and armv5 armv6, towards an amd64 or arm64 VM.
Ultimately, we also want to be able to use a different architecture for the host and the cluster (different story*)

* #9593

GOARCH=386

GOARCH=arm GOARM=5

[medyagh]

I dont see why not !

[tstromberg]

What changes are you suggesting to minikube exactly?

[afbjorklund]

What changes are you suggesting to minikube exactly?

My initial idea was to build a minikube binary for these, but that also assumes it has access to another machine for the cluster.

• minikube-linux-armv6
• minikube-linux-386 (assuming an i686)

So it might need some improvements to the ssh driver, and it would also need splitting of architecture between host and machine.

Basically I want to stretch the definition of "local Kubernetes", without changing the main target or introduce any security concerns.

minikube quickly sets up a local Kubernetes cluster on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
We proudly focus on helping application developers and new Kubernetes users.

The end goal is to bring it to more platforms, you might not have access to one big computer (or VM) - but maybe two smaller ?

Will assume that the user would want access to a regular desktop environment on the first machine (2 vCPU, 2G RAM)
And then the control-plane-node would also have similar requirements (2 vCPU, 2G RAM), at least when using "kubeadm"

So instead of doing one machine with 4 vCPU and 4G RAM (in total), it would be sufficient with two connected machines.

[medyagh]

I believe the pre-requisite for this is, to have our cached fixed to add CPU archs

this seems like a feature to allow running minikube with a different arch than the host. this will unlock private clouds

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[medyagh]

I am going to close this issue for now till we have more interest from the users