Support for pre-built aarch64/arm64 wheels

[daniel-j-h]

With mac folks transitioning to aarch64 as a viable platform, it would be great to provide pre-built aarch64 wheels for rasterio, too.

I'm opening this ticket so we can capture thoughts, blockers, and a plan moving forward.

I think long term having arm64 wheels would be great, but also know that right now it's very early for arm64.

Thoughts? 🤗

[sgillies]

This project is derived from the projects that make wheels for numpy, pillow, etc. We should do whatever they are doing now to support these architectures. One difference from rasterio to numpy is that GDAL's dependencies are rather huge and take time to work out. Unfortunately, it's a project that I can't see myself starting right now. I am going to leave it up to those who want the wheels.

[odidev]

I have tried to build linux aarch64 wheels using Travis-Ci but it looks that the Travis-ci is failing for amd64 giving the below error -

Collecting pip
  Using cached pip-21.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (1.5 MB)
Installing collected packages: pip
Successfully installed pip-21.1.2
WARNING: Running pip as root will break packages and permissions. You should install packages reliably by using venv: https://pip.pypa.io/warnings/venv
config.sh: line 354: syntax error: unexpected end of file

I have also found an issue which shows Travis is out of credit.
@sgillies I can contribute in adding linux arm64 wheels. To start with could you please tell the steps/CI which you are using presently to release the wheel on pypi.

[odidev]

@sgillies, Could you please let me know your interest in releasing aarch64 wheels. It would be really helpful for aarch64 users.

[sgillies]

@odidev you are welcome to fork this repo and create a Travis account to do builds. And then if they pass, we could merge them there. The rasterio project does not currently have funding to pay for contributor PR builds and I cannot give you access to my work Travis account.

[odidev]

@sgillies, Thanks for your response, I will busy in some other high priority task. I will make a try to build it. Thanks.

[Firefishy]

GitHub actions are going to be getting Arm-based hosted runners.

@sgillies Would you consider signing up to join the waitlist for the private beta (at above link)?

Alternative is to run the ARM builds using emulation, but it is painfully slow as can be seen here: https://github.com/Firefishy/rasterio-wheels/actions/runs/6802322622/job/18495174179