RFC: Consider retiring the PI1s ARMv6 (downgrading support to "experimental")

[refack]

PI1 load

PI2 for comparison:

[refack]

/CC @rvagg @nodejs/platform-arm

[Trott]

Is this worth putting on the Build WG agenda? Might be a good idea to lay out the case for retiring them in a sentence or two.

[rvagg]

FYI I spent the day tinkering with the Pi1's. Ended up reprovisioning 4 of the Pi1's entirely and replacing two of the SD cards. So currently Jenkins sees them all as online (first time in a long while), but I'm dubious about a few of them. I've been keeping a log for the past 18 months of maintenance so I can better track which Pi's have repeating problems and might suggest more fundamental problems than just a dodgy OS or SD card. Over the next few days we should keep an eye on repeat failures on individual Pi's and take repeat offenders offline. If any of the ones I fixed up today show recurring problems, particularly ones that I replaced SD cards in, then it might be time to be retiring hardware.

[rvagg]

I think we're in a better place with the whole compliment online, and there's a ton of green so doesn't appear to be any problems (yet) with the machines I've brought back online.

This is not to nullify the original point though, it's certainly worth considering retirement, especially as the test suite grows and these are holding us back. Mean execution time for test-binary-arm seems to be ~42 minutes with the current test suite. That's up from under 30 minutes a couple of years ago.

If we drop the Pi1's, we're essentially dropping ARMv6 support unless we want to go an emulation route (that might be more pain than the Pi1's are though!). Maybe it's time though? There's very little ARMv6 hardware being shipped anymore, it's nearly 20 years old and the main consumers are users with old devices, like Pi1's.

Pretty much the only market data we have is the download numbers, see 2019 so far below. I honestly don't know how to frame this. ARMv6 is only 0.08%, but that's still more than ARM64 (whodathunk?) and double any of the IBM platforms. What do we do with that information?

(This is ordered by total recorded download count, not just for the time period I've selected, hence s390x being last even though it beats ppc64 which has been downloaded more times in its lifetime).

[Trott]

Since this has evolved (during today's Build WG meeting, anyway) into a discussion about dropping support for armv6/Pi 1 devices entirely: /ping @nodejs/hardware

[rvagg]

We are considering dropping official ARMv6 support for Node 12 similar to x86 being dropped for Node 10. The cost of running our growing test suite and maintaining the hardware for it isn't small and each LTS release line locks us in for 3 years.

This would mean that Raspberry Pi 1 and 1+ would not have official binaries available for download from nodejs.org, but it would not prevent anyone from offering unofficial ones. Unfortunately building directly on ARMv6 hardware takes a long time and cross-compiling is extremely complicated.

We would like feedback from who this might impact so we can better understand the costs to users, we have very little insight.

Node 10 and below would still support ARMv6 and still ship binaries on nodejs.org for the duration of their support lifetime.

[dceejay]

I think this would also affect Pi0 and Pi0w

[knolleary]

The Pi 1 and 1+ have both been superseded by newer ARMv7 models.

The Pi Zero is ARMv6 and from its site:

End of life of the Raspberry Pi Zero is currently stated as being not before January 2022.

(edited to add link: see Specification tab on https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/)

If that means this gen of the Pi Zero is here to stay for a while yet, there will be a 8 month window at least once Node 10 reaches EOL where there will be no official build of Node for the Pi Zero. Of course they might refresh the hardware before then.

We in the Node-RED project do have a user-base running on Pis of all shapes and sizes. The Pi Zero is pretty under powered, so I don't believe there are that many users on that particular device, but there will be some. We can try to gauge interest from our user community on this topic.