Building Chromium on Windows 7

[Bruce Dawson]

TL;DR - if you still build Chrome on Windows 7 you should consider migrating your build machines to Windows 10.

Is anybody still building Chrome on Windows 7? If so then there is an issue that you should be aware of, recorded in crbug.com/976161.

The basic problem is that dbghelp.dll from the latest Windows 10 SDK (10.0.18362.0) doesn't load on Windows 7. This doesn't affect how Chrome runs, but it can affect building Chrome. The Chrome build process copies this DLL from "c:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Debuggers" and if the 10.0.18362.0 version is copied then character_data_generator.exe and some other programs will fail to run.

Further complicating things, this SDK has some header file changes that we need for C++ conformance. So, in order to build Chrome on Windows 7 you need the latest headers but you can't have the latest Debuggers package.

Also, as previously mentioned, you need an even older version of d3dcompiler_47.dll to get Chrome itself to run reliably on Windows 7.

crrev.com/c/1674628 will switch Google's build machines to a toolchain package that includes all of this. See the CL description for details.

Microsoft is investigating the dbghelp.dll issues.

[Dirk Pranke]

If we don't get a bunch of people saying that they still need to build on win7, I'd be inclined to suggest that we drop support for it. Anyone disagree?

-- Dirk

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[Bruce Dawson]

The odd thing is that I thought that our tests also depended on dbghelp.dll, and those need to run on Windows 7, so how come those didn't all break when I switched us to the 1903 SDK? Strange.

[Takuto Ikuta]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 4:33 AM Bruce Dawson <bruce...@chromium.org> wrote:

The odd thing is that I thought that our tests also depended on dbghelp.dll, and those need to run on Windows 7, so how come those didn't all break when I switched us to the 1903 SDK? Strange.

I think we don't send dbghelp.dll come with depot_tools from build machine to our win7 machine doing test.

https://cs.chromium.org/search/?q=dbghelp.dll+file:.*gn&sq=package:chromium&type=cs

dbghelp.dll needs to be in data of copy action to be sent to testing machine.

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[SangWoo Ko]

I'm one of the embedders and I'm still building on Windows 7. There're a lot of users using Windows 7 and we sometimes run into windows 7 specific issues like UI on non-aero mode.

2019년 6월 26일 수요일 오전 3시 7분 59초 UTC+9, Bruce Dawson 님의 말:

[PhistucK]

> There're a lot of users using Windows 7 and we sometimes run into windows 7 specific issues like UI on non-aero mode.

Do those issues exist in Chrome (or in other words, in a Chromium-built-on-Windows-10-and-running-on-Windows-7), too? Or do you think those issues are Chromium-built-on-Windows-7-and-running-on-Windows-7 specific?

☆PhistucK

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[SangWoo Ko]

I think it's quite rare but Chromium has those risk too. For example, I remember http://crbug.com/946446 . I guess this can happen no matter what it was built on. We can fix this kind of things on Windows 10 but it'd be very hard to debug and test. That's all I concern. 

2019년 6월 26일 수요일 오후 5시 20분 3초 UTC+9, PhistucK 님의 말:

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[Daniel Bratell]

Thanks for the heads-up!

Not speaking for everyone at Opera but there are at least some people with Windows 7 on their development machines here. A quick look for global stats[1] say that in general 45% of people use Win10 and 35% use Win7 so it's still a very popular operating system (4x more common than all Mac versions combined).

For unaffiliated contributors, the home version of Windows 10 can be a bit annoying to use as a development environment too.

/Daniel

[1] https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?options=%7B"filter"%3A%7B"%24and"%3A%5B%7B"deviceType"%3A%7B"%24in"%3A%5B"Desktop%2Flaptop"%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C"dateLabel"%3A"Trend"%2C"attributes"%3A"share"%2C"group"%3A"platformVersion"%2C"sort"%3A%7B"share"%3A-1%7D%2C"id"%3A"platformsDesktopVersions"%2C"dateInterval"%3A"Monthly"%2C"dateStart"%3A"2018-06"%2C"dateEnd"%3A"2019-05"%2C"segments"%3A"-1000"%7D

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[Dirk Pranke]

I'm not sure if anyone was confused by my note, but I/we have no plans to deprecate running on Win7 as part of this discussion. I was only talking about building. Running on Win7 is a whole different discussion and as people point out, there are many, many people still running on Win7.

However, it's good to hear from people that are still building on Win7, too! I wouldn't generally want to drop support for platforms unless supporting them really complicates or blocks work we want to do, or if we just think it's not really being used. 

It sounds like from Bruce's note that it's still quite doable to build on Win7, it's just getting more complicated to do so.

-- Dirk

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/op.z3zukevsrbppqq%40cicero2.linkoping.osa.

[Nico Weber]

On mac, it's very common that we require a recent macOS for building but target an older one for running. Like Dirk, I think it's fine if the dev experience no Win 7 isn't as good as on Win 10 if newer SDKs from Microsoft cause that. Trying to support building on Win 7 better than the platform vendor seems like a losing battle.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/CAEoffTDJbR9DbFgwkQ%2B4Fz8XM3Z%2BOn-mMGHY0vuerjog0q43%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Daniel Bratell]

The OS usage numbers meant to show what the potential mass (I still dream) of unaffiliated open source developers might be using, and showing that cutting off Windows 7 as a potential development platform might reduce that mass quite a bit.

Doesn't mean that Win7 must be kept even if working on Windows 7, or maintaining Windows 7 as a development platform is too complicated or costly but it should be an informed decision.

/Daniel

[K Moon]

Just as another point of anecdata, I don't develop outside of work right now, but my personal machine still runs Windows 7. (I'm not happy with what I've heard about the update policy on Windows 10 for home users.) I can imagine wanting to continue to contribute if my current employment ended, and I'm sure I'll need to accept Windows 10 to run on newer hardware, but I'm dragging my feet as long as I'm happy with my current system (which is still fairly powerful).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/op.z3zzj1oxrbppqq%40cicero2.linkoping.osa.

[Bruce Dawson]

Microsoft said that the Windows 7 problem with dbghelp.dll was a mistake - caused by insufficient test coverage - which they will fix. So, building on Windows 7 should work without franken-SDKs in the future. They didn't commit to a particular schedule for releasing the fix so I am guessing the fall SDK.