Dropping 32-bit builds

[gibfahn]

This came out of discussion of #809 in the last WG meeting (#875, minutes at #881). Discussion paraphrased below.

Basically updating CentOS 6 to gcc 4.9.3 requires devtoolset-6, which means that we can no longer do 32-bit xLinux builds.

It's difficult to know how many people are currently using x86_64 32-bit Node. The metrics show it looking pretty stagnant, but it's difficult to know how many of the downloads are from CI.

@rvagg suggested that the best way to find out would be to drop 32-bit builds in an odd-numbered release and see how many people complain, that way we have the option of adding them back in a minor version. The question was whether 9.x is too soon to do this.

Rod also said that he thought CentOS6 and Ubuntu 14 no longer had a 32-bit version, meaning that anyone relying on a 32-bit OS had already been left behind by Node 8.x. If we could confirm that this is true for most Linux and Windows versions then that would make the decision much easier.

Todo (if we decide to drop 32-bit)

• Update the jobs to skip 32-bit Intel for Node >8.x
• Update the website to handle the lack of 32-bit builds
• Update the Supported Platforms list to remove x86.

[gibfahn]

More info on the state of play at the OS level would definitely be useful (i.e. when/if major distros stopped supporting 32-bit OSs, i.e. who we'd be breaking).

• Linux: maybe @rvagg or @chrislea would know off the top of their heads
• Windows: @joaocgreis and @refack
• SmartOS: @nodejs/platform-smartos would be good to know your thoughts, I assume we don't have to drop 32-bit on SmartOS, but if we're doing it elsewhere it might be a good time to do it here too.

[refack]

Windows 10 still supports 32bit and "cross compiling" from a 64bit host to a 32bit target is also fully supported.
Windows Server 2008R2 was not released as 32bit host, but Windows has side-by-side technology (WoW64) that allows 32bit applications to run natively on 64bit hosts, so there should not be an external limitation for building, testing and running node32 for the foreseeable future.

BTW: AWS/Azure/GCP doesn't rent 32bit VMs of our lowest supported Windows (Server 2008R2).

[chrislea]

There is absolutely still support for 32bit CentOS 6 / RHEL 6 Linux out there. Also, all Debian and Ubuntu releases still have 32bit versions, and Fedora still makes 32bit releases as well.

Red Hat dropped 32bit support with RHEL 7.

I don't have much of a sense of how many people are using 32bit builds in production. If I had to guess (emphasis mine there), I doubt many people are running 32bit Node builds on production servers, and I suspect the biggest impact might be not so much on production servers, but instead on appliances. For example, here's output from a Synology NAS that I have at home:

chl@DSPlay01:~$ uname -a
Linux DSPlay01 3.2.40 #15152 SMP PREEMPT Fri Sep 1 11:13:20 CST 2017 i686 GNU/Linux synology_evansport_214play

And yes, Node is an installable package should I choose to put it on this device. A lot of these appliance gizmos use 32bit chips because they don't have much memory and want to keep costs low, so older 32bit Atom or Celeron processors make sense.

Now, having said all that, if we assume I'm right, then I don't think we need to be too concerned about anything other than making sure that Node will in fact build on a 32bit system with a modern enough compiler, because from what I can tell almost all of these appliances have their own packaging formats and tend to build the things they need for those packages themselves.

[seishun]

@gibfahn I don't see any reason to drop 32-bit builds on Windows.

@chrislea

then I don't think we need to be too concerned about anything other than making sure that Node will in fact build on a 32bit system with a modern enough compiler

That shouldn't be a problem. We could just continue running CI jobs on 32-bit platforms where it's easy enough to install a supported compiler, e.g. Ubuntu 14.04.

[joaocgreis]

We shouldn't drop Windows 32-bit support. While our deps have support for it, it'll be easy for us to maintain. Windows and Visual Studio have full support for 32-bit.

[bnoordhuis]

Apropos Fedora, i686 is in a state of disrepair and has been for years: https://lwn.net/Articles/728207/

There is a Special Interest Group since a few months that fixed some things but I think it's safe to say no one runs Fedora i686 in production and it's not worth spending time on.

[chrislea]

Unfortunately I have seen people running 32bit Fedora out there in the wild (same for CentOS 6 and occasionally an older Debian / Ubuntu release). But generally I feel like all the major distros want to drop it and are sort of looking at each other waiting to see who does it first. I know Arch Linux (not one of the major ones, but important among the more hacker / bleeding edge types) is dropping it officially in November of this year.

So I still feel pretty comfortable with what I said above, which is that I think we'd be okay if we continue to "support" it in the sense that we make sure it will in fact build on a 32bit x86 machine, but we stop making official release tarballs for it.

[gibfahn]

So maybe the answer is to drop it to Tier 2 or Experimental rather than dropping completely.

[jasnell]

Some informal research shows that there are still a fair number of users using 32-bit builds on smaller IoT devices. I doubt this is a large group, but it's still worth bearing in mind.

I'm going to tag this with a tsc-review label.

[chrislea]

Yes @jasnell if you'd like my $0.02 on the "devices" thing (I'm sure you're just dying to hear) it's here.

[gibfahn]

@chrislea wrong link? That seems to point to my comment above.

[chrislea]

My bad, try this.