Mark,
On 6/15/23 05:31, Mark Thomas wrote:
All,
I'm currently looking at adding the Windows specific binary
distributions to Maven Central as a result of PR #609 [1].
That got me thinking whether Windows 32-bit was still supported.
Some quick research found that:
- The only currently supported 32-bit version of Windows is Windows 10
which reaches EOL on 2025-10-14
- OpenJDK only provides 64-bit Windows releases for Java 20
- Oracle only provides 64-bit Windows releases for Java 9 onwards
- The Java 21 EA releases only include 64-bit builds for Windows
- The latest Temurin release for 32-bit Windows is Java 19
- The latest Azul release for 32-bit Windows is Java 17
Given the above, I think we can safely:
- plan to stop providing 32-bit Windows builds after 2025-10-14
- remove 32-bit Windows builds from Tomcat 11
Microsoft has sometimes allowed customers to stick with "unsupported"
versions of Windows my just paying for
super-secret-double-extended-support lifetimes. I'm not sure how they
will feel about that EOY 2025 for Windows 10, but it could happen.
Given that the only remaining supported 32-bit Windows operating system
is a consumer one (the last Windows server OS to support 32-bit was
Sever 2008) do we want to drop 32-bit support from any other products
and/or versions? I'm thinking about Tomcat Native, Connectors (mod_jk &
ISAPI redirector), and the earlier Tomcat versions.
Personally, I'm leaning towards not making any further changes until
after 2025-10-14 but what does everyone else think?
Certainly there's no reason to change anything just yet, but this is a
reasonable conversation to have starting now.
Another data point: Apache Lounge (Windows builds for httpd and related
modules) only does 64-bit builds for mod_jk. I didn't look at archives
to see how far back in time you have to go in order to get a 32-bit build.
Given that we bundle libtcnative with Tomcat but do not build it
on-demand for each release (that is, we just pull the existing binaries)
and we should continue to bundle both 32-bit and 64-bit libtcnative
builds with Tomcat 9 semi-indefinitely, I think it's actually more work
to remove the 32-bit builds from Tomcat 10, 11, etc. than it is to leave
them in, no?
32-bit builds for the installer/uninstaller and mod_jk seem more
obvious. I think these days it's /much/ more likely that someone is
running a 32-bit JVM on a 64-bit OS than on a 32-bit OS. So it really
doesn't matter if the installer/uninstaller are available as 32-bit as
long as the installer installs the arch-appropriate libtcnative.
-chris
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