Apt package for Arm64 Ubuntu 22.04

[Aposhian]

Currently, there is an apt package published for gazebo on amd64 for Ubuntu 22.04, but not for arm64. Is there a technical reason for this, or is it just a task to cross-compile and release it?

[EzraBrooks]

As someone who primarily runs my simulations inside Ubuntu VMs on an Apple Silicon Mac, this is blocking me from upgrading to Jammy 😞

[EzraBrooks]

Hi @chapulina, @vatanaksoytezer pointed me in your direction as someone to ping about the status of this. Is there anything I can do to help get this done? I and a couple other folks at PickNik are using Apple Silicon Macs these days.

[j-rivero]

Currently, there is an apt package published for gazebo on amd64 for Ubuntu 22.04, but not for arm64. Is there a technical reason for this, or is it just a task to cross-compile and release it?

We are not releasing Gazebo11 binary packages inside Open Robotics infrastructure anymore starting with Ubuntu 22.04. Instead of that we rely on community efforts (we try to help in any of them) for packaging the software. In the case of Ubuntu/Debian we have been contributing to Debian to maintain the Gazebo package there as an official Debian package. Ubuntu usually sync the packages from Debian when a new release is under development.

For Ubuntu gazebo11 official packages they are only available for amd64. The reason is that the package inside Debian/Ubuntu depends on libqtpropertybrowser-dev (which is amd64 only). When we released the package inside our own infrastructure at Open Robotics we embedded part of the code of libqtpropertybrowser-dev so the platform limitation did not appear.

To help you in this case, I've setup a Launchpad PPA to release Gazebo11 using the embedded code, you can find the packages for arm64 and ppc64el at https://launchpad.net/~openrobotics/+archive/ubuntu/gazebo11-non-amd64.

armhf build seems to be affected by https://github.com/osrf/gazebo/issues/3208. Should not be difficult to fix, PRs are welcome in the case that anyone has interest on having it.

[EzraBrooks]

thanks @j-rivero. my application appears to still be failing to build after adding the PPA, due to missing the ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs package. Is it feasible to get that in the PPA as well, since it's not in the OSRF or Ubuntu repos?

[j-rivero]

thanks @j-rivero. my application appears to still be failing to build after adding the PPA, due to missing the ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs package. Is it feasible to get that in the PPA as well, since it's not in the OSRF or Ubuntu repos?

ROS packages are a bit different since they are typically hosted in packages.ros.org and being built in the ROS buildfarm. I can propose the and handle the inclusion in ROS repository so packages for Humble and others are built for arm64 in the same way than for amd64. Before doing I would like to check and fix a couple of small things:

• Verification that the PPA packages actually work on arm64 (Gazebo GUI appears and is usable)
• Fix for the armhf build problem #3208

[EzraBrooks]

On my Jammy VM with the PPA and packages.ros.org both included in the sources, I get:

 gazebo : Depends: gazebo-common (= 11.10.2+dfsg-1osrf2) but it is not going to be installed
          Recommends: gazebo-plugin-base but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

if I run apt policy gazebo-common I get:

gazebo-common:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 11.10.2+dfsg-1
  Version table:
     11.10.2+dfsg-1 500
        500 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy/universe arm64 Packages

[j-rivero]

On my Jammy VM with the PPA and packages.ros.org both included in the sources, I get:

Umm, may I get a Dockerfile that reproduces the problem, please?

[EzraBrooks]

here's a quick and dirty example based on ros:humble that's exhibiting the same issue as my VM.

FROM --platform=arm64 ros:humble

RUN apt update && apt install -yyq software-properties-common
RUN add-apt-repository ppa:openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64
RUN apt update
RUN apt-get install gazebo

output:

 > [5/5] RUN apt-get install gazebo:
#8 0.173 Reading package lists...
#8 0.517 Building dependency tree...
#8 0.594 Reading state information...
#8 0.630 Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
#8 0.630 requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
#8 0.630 distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
#8 0.630 or been moved out of Incoming.
#8 0.630 The following information may help to resolve the situation:
#8 0.630
#8 0.630 The following packages have unmet dependencies:
#8 0.675  gazebo : Depends: gazebo-common (= 11.10.2+dfsg-1osrf2) but it is not going to be installed
#8 0.675           Recommends: gazebo-plugin-base but it is not going to be installed
#8 0.679 E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

[samuk]

I was trying to solve this and found: http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly/dists/jammy/main/binary-arm64/

So I did

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Paste: deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly jammy main

wget  http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key
sudo apt-key add gazebo.key
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-cache search gazebo

gazebo-common - Open Source Robotics Simulator - Shared files gazebo-doc - Open Source Robotics Simulator - Documentation libignition-gazebo-dev - Ignition Gazebo classes and functions for robot apps - Development files libignition-gazebo-plugins - Ignition Gazebo classes and functions for robot apps - Plugins libignition-gazebo6-6 - Ignition Gazebo classes and functions for robot apps - Shared library ros-simulators-dev - Robot OS simulators development metapackage libignition-gazebo7 - transitional package libignition-gazebo7-dbg - transitional package libignition-gazebo7-dev - transitional package libignition-gazebo7-plugins - transitional package python3-ignition-gazebo7 - transitional package ros-humble-gazebo-dev - Provides a cmake config for the default version of Gazebo for the ROS distribution. ros-humble-gazebo-msgs - Message and service data structures for interacting with Gazebo from ROS2. ros-humble-gazebo-msgs-dbgsym - debug symbols for ros-humble-gazebo-msgs ros-humble-menge-vendor - Menge is a powerful, cross-platform, modular framework for crowd simulation developed at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. ros-humble-rmf-building-sim-common - Common utility functions for Gazebo and ignition building plugins ros-humble-rmf-building-sim-ignition-plugins - Ignition gazebo plugins for building infrastructure simulation ros-humble-rmf-robot-sim-common - Common utility functions for Gazebo and ignition RMF plugins

I was just about to try and install, am I better off using the PPA instead?

[samuk]

Same here (with the deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly jammy main) and PPA enabled

sudo su root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/linorobot2_ws# apt update && apt install -yyq software-properties-common Hit:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy InRelease Hit:2 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-updates InRelease
Hit:3 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-backports InRelease
Hit:4 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-security InRelease
Hit:5 https://apt.foxglove.dev/studio stable InRelease
Hit:6 http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Get:7 http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly jammy InRelease [4,283 B] Fetched 4,283 B in 3s (1,288 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done All packages are up to date. W: http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly/dists/jammy/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details. Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... software-properties-common is already the newest version (0.99.22.2). software-properties-common set to manually installed. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/linorobot2_ws# add-apt-repository ppa:openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64 PPA publishes dbgsym, you may need to include 'main/debug' component Repository: 'deb https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64/ubuntu/ jammy main' Description: The PPA hosts the Gazebo11 non amd64 versions of the simulator for the Ubuntu versions that have not them and also not present in packages.osrfoundation.org (support ended in Focal). More info: https://launchpad.net/~openrobotics/+archive/ubuntu/gazebo11-non-amd64 Adding repository. Press [ENTER] to continue or Ctrl-c to cancel. Adding deb entry to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openrobotics-ubuntu-gazebo11-non-amd64-jammy.list Adding disabled deb-src entry to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openrobotics-ubuntu-gazebo11-non-amd64-jammy.list Adding key to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/openrobotics-ubuntu-gazebo11-non-amd64.gpg with fingerprint BD832F46DA885E3353629A832FE9B048E92252B9 Hit:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy InRelease Hit:2 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-updates InRelease
Hit:3 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-backports InRelease
Hit:4 https://apt.foxglove.dev/studio stable InRelease
Hit:5 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-security InRelease
Get:6 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64/ubuntu jammy InRelease [24.4 kB]
Hit:7 http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Get:8 http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly jammy InRelease [4,283 B] Get:9 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64/ubuntu jammy/main arm64 Packages [1,820 B] Get:10 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64/ubuntu jammy/main Translation-en [796 B] Fetched 31.3 kB in 4s (8,550 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done W: http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly/dists/jammy/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details. root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/linorobot2_ws# apt update Hit:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy InRelease Hit:2 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-updates InRelease
Hit:3 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-backports InRelease
Hit:4 https://apt.foxglove.dev/studio stable InRelease
Hit:5 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64/ubuntu jammy InRelease Hit:6 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports jammy-security InRelease
Hit:7 http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Get:8 http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly jammy InRelease [4,283 B] Fetched 4,283 B in 4s (1,173 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done All packages are up to date. W: http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly/dists/jammy/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details. root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/linorobot2_ws# apt-get install gazebo Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies: gazebo : Depends: gazebo-common (= 11.10.2+dfsg-1osrf2) but it is not going to be installed Recommends: gazebo-plugin-base but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/linorobot2_ws#

If I apt-get gazebo-common from http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ then apt-get install gazebo it gives

Depends: gazebo-common (= 11.10.2+dfsg-1osrf2) but 11.10.2+dfsg-1 is to be installed

[j-rivero]

Umm interesting. There was a conflict with a non-platform package (gazebo-common) and the require of the PPA exact version. I've relaxed the restriction since gazebo-common package should be compatible and almost the same (if not identical). Could you please update and give a try to version 11.10.2+dfsg-1osrf3?

[EzraBrooks]

After that change, it does install correctly and I am able to launch the Gazebo GUI and add objects to the simulation 🙂

[samuk]

Yes, lovely installing Gazebo works for me too. Thanks.

The script I'm trying to run still fails as ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs doesn't yet exist.

[j-rivero]

After that change, it does install correctly and I am able to launch the Gazebo GUI and add objects to the simulation slightly_smiling_face

Thanks guys for testing. Happy to heard that the simulator is working for you.

The script I'm trying to run still fails as ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs doesn't yet exist.

Yep, for that to happen we need a few more steps. Mainly:

• Patch the code to compile on armhf see armhf build seems to be affected by https://github.com/osrf/gazebo/issues/3208.
• As soon as I get the patch for that I'll build the armhf version and import the packages to the ROS repo.
• At that point, the buildfarm should produce the ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs binaries from now on.

[EzraBrooks]

Is armhf a supported platform for ROS? arm64 Ubuntu is a tier 1 platform according to OSRF. I don't have an armhf machine on hand to fix this issue, otherwise I would be happy to contribute a fix.

I have some coworkers on arm64 laptops to whom I'm handing a codebase off to next week that still uses gazebo11, so it would be nice to have the ROS packages on hand, even if we need to grab them from the nightlies - do we need to block on this armhf issue?

[samuk]

I only find one reference to BVHlLoader.cc in the code

[j-rivero]

For a testing armhf platform, we can probably use a Dockerfile:

FROM --platform=armhf ubuntu:jammy

RUN apt update && apt install -yyq software-properties-common build-essential
RUN add-apt-repository -s ppa:openrobotics/gazebo11-non-amd64
RUN apt update
RUN apt-get source gazebo

and docker buildx build . + docker run.

Is armhf a supported platform for ROS? arm64 Ubuntu is a tier 1 platform according to OSRF. I don't have an armhf machine on hand to fix this issue, otherwise I would be happy to contribute a fix.

While armhf is not a supported platform in tier 1 for ROS we have typically request that platform for users of Gazebo standalone and I would like to have too if possible. Thanks!

[EzraBrooks]

I spent some time with the above solution (armhf emulation through Docker) between my last comment and now, but unfortunately I'm not skilled enough in CMake to diagnose the issue. My initial instinct was that it had something to do with position-independent code, since I've seen that before, but after some simple debugging and dumping the compile commands, it still wasn't working even with -fPIC on, as far as I could tell, every library. But take this with a grain of salt - I am not a C++ programmer by trade 😞

[samuk]

Any updates on this? Would be great to get Gazebo on Humble/Arm

[KilianFt]

I made it work with installing gazebo as mentioned above, instead of

sudo apt-get install gazebo

I used

sudo apt-get install libgazebo-dev

as I needed the additional packages.
Regarding ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs, just download it from their github and build it locally like any other ROS package with colcon build. Worked both in docker and native on Ubuntu 22.04 with arm64.

[EzraBrooks]

I've been building ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs from source as well, but it has introduced some library version conflicts with some other packages in my project, which is annoying.

[pgarcia-dev]

Hi all, First of all thank you for this post 🙂

I am facing the same problem described here under arm64. I was able to install gazebo and make it work with the given explanation above but I can’t install ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs neither ros-rolling-gazebo-ros-pkgs

I see these packages do exist for Ubuntu focal: http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu/dists/focal/main/binary-arm64/Packages but they don’t for Ubuntu jammy: http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu/dists/jammy/main/binary-arm64/Packages

I've been building ros-humble-gazebo-ros-pkgs from source as well, but it has introduced some library version conflicts with some other packages in my project, which is annoying.

Same here

is it planned to add all gazebo related to Ros packages to the OSRF jammy repo for humble and/or rolling?

did anyone find a workaround?

[samuk]

Afaik this os the bug stopping the packages being built https://github.com/osrf/gazebo/issues/3208 It's unclear to me if anyone is working on it.

[pgarcia-dev]

Does anyone know if anybody is working and that? @j-rivero ?

[j-rivero]

Does anyone know if anybody is working and that? @j-rivero ?

Should not be difficult to fix but I did not have time to get into it. Count me in for reviewing the patch and doing the release and import to the ROS buildfarm but I would appreciate if someone can please send the patch for #3208.

[j-rivero]

Should not be difficult to fix but I did not have time to get into it. Count me in for reviewing the patch and doing the release and import to the ROS buildfarm but I would appreciate if someone can please send the patch for #3208.

I made the fix for the arm version and send the patch to the code: https://github.com/gazebosim/gazebo-classic/pull/3283 and build the packages for armhf, arm64 and ppc64 in https://launchpad.net/~openrobotics/+archive/ubuntu/gazebo11-non-amd64.

Unfortunately the packages are not going to be imported to the ROS repository for some good reasons, see https://github.com/osrf/gazebo_tutorials/pull/169/. From here you have a couple of options: build gazebo_ros_pkgs from source using the PPA binaries for Gazebo11 on arm64 or migrate to the new Gazebo if that is an option so you get full support and binaries.

[jpgtzg]

I get this issue when running gazebo --verbose [Err] [TopicManager.cc:321] Shouldn't get here topic[/gazebo/default/request]

And then gazebo freezes. I can't find any solutions to the issue.