PSA: Minimum Linux build requirements raised starting in M93 (EoL for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04)

[Jason Clinton]

Chrome has traditionally supported older Linux distributions beyond their security end-of-life and sometimes into the commercial vendor extended support period.

It gets increasingly difficult to harden the Linux bot runners against attackers when we're running these older, unsupported OSes. And, for all of our engineering teams, supporting older releases has costs (e.g. older glibc, older kernel APIs).

Ubuntu ended Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 support last month. Following their lead, we will end support for OS releases roughly equivalent to Ubuntu 16.04 and earlier in Chrome 93. This gives people who are using these installations ~3 months to migrate to a newer LTS release (e.g. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is supported until 2023 which Chrome will continue to support until then).

The minimum Chromium Linux build requirements for M93 will be raised to the equivalent of ~Ubuntu 18.04 levels: kernel 4.14 (closest LTS branch, Ubuntu is actually 4.15) and ~glibc 2.27. These currently in-support OS releases should meet the requirements: Ubuntu 18.04+, Debian 10+, openSUSE 15.2+, or Fedora Linux 32+.

[Jason Clinton]

+chromium-dev

Yes, the draft is already done but it won't be published until M93 goes stable ~August 31.

On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 9:13 AM Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org> wrote:

Is an update to https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7100626 in the works?

> --
> --
> Chromium Developers mailing list: chromi...@chromium.org
> View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
> http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chromium-dev...@chromium.org.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/CACVW55iiJU9RYGyQ_3%3DVG-06TxFvJGjG-2MCC5GE5EWeVworng%40mail.gmail.com.