Clear up situation around 32-bit

💻 Development
1

Recently it was silently documented that nextcloud doesn’t support 32-bit architectures (document that 64bit is required by szaimen · Pull Request #9071 · nextcloud/documentation · GitHub). This is very unfortunate, since I’m running nextcloud on a 32-bit arm device, and lots of other people do as well. Nextcloud does run pretty well on this architecture, except two bugs that have long been open. One of them is the thrash being unusable when the files in it are too big and one of them is the limit of max 2gb for file downloads. I fixed the second one recently (Fix big file download for 32-bit servers by fwsmit · Pull Request #33197 · nextcloud/server · GitHub) in a way that doesn’t change anything for 64-bit systems, but that fix didn’t get accepted.

A few things were noted about that fix that made it not acceptable, but it’s unclear if this fix will be accepted in any state. So that’s what I’m asking here: Will any 32-bit specific fixes be accepted for nextcloud server?

2

This must be annoying for you. I will discuss this with the director of engineering to clear this up. I am unfortunately out of office from tomorrow on for two weeks but I will discuss this with him on my return and I will keep you closely informed. I also gave the link to your post to him.

3

Hi, could you give a follow up on this?

4

Hello hello,
So I discussed this situation with the relevant developers and the director of engineering. We agreed to accept pull requests for 32 bit fixes from the community if the PR’s seem of a good quality and will pose little risk for causing problems. (Please note we do not test the PR’s ourselves locally against 32 bit because we don’t have those test environments anymore, so an accepted PR doesn’t mean we really guarantee the intended functionality, and if the PR’s do cause problems and we reject it, we can’t dig to give more specific pointers on how to improve the PR.) I hope this is good with you?

1 Like
5

I intend to compile a 32bit arm desktop client (Raspberry Pi Zero) , so I appreciate continued support for 32 bit.

6

If it is just for the client, if you don’t need the specific nextcloud client functions, you could just hook to it via native webdav…

7

Hi @tflidd,
Interesting: what is “native webdav”?

I want to set up a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a NextCloud client sink, meaning that it should regularly sync from server to client, so that rdiff-backup or a similar tool creates a backup.

If I can achieve the sync with “native webdav”, I’m all in!

On the other hand I also would like to better understand the inner workings of NextCloud, and the nextcloudcmd CLI command seems to be appropriate.

So my current goal is to compile nextcloudcmd for 32bit ARMv6.

8

Hi @tflidd
Did you mean a webdav client with “native webdav”?
I tried davix without success.

davix-ls dav://MY_NEXTCLOUD_URL --userlogin NAME --userpass 'PWD'
(Davix::HttpRequest) Error: HTTP 405 : Method Not Allowed, Permission refused

davix-ls dav://NONEXISTING_URL --userlogin NAME --userpass 'PWD'
(Davix::HttpRequest) Error: Domain name resolution failed
9

You could try davfs2. Should work on any Linux distribution. bash - Auto mount webdav folder - Ask Ubuntu

10

@bb77, thank you, this is an excellent idea!

I have succesfuly mounted my NextCloud with davfs2 on my Raspberry Pi Zero W (32bit ARMv6), following the procedure in How to mount WebDAV share – sleeplessbeastie's notes

I’m glad for this option, because compiling nextcloudcmd is a major effort, starting with the fact that Qt5 is not only used for the GUI but the networking too. I cannot even compile it on Ubuntu, and crosscompiling or compiling on the Raspi will be much more difficult.

To all: which NexCloud client do you use on 32-bit arm devices, and how did you install it?

11

I just realize this discussion regards 32-bit server

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#server