Ubuntu 16.04 is EOL after April 2021

[Trott]

Ubuntu 16.04 is EOL this month. Should we plan to remove it from CI?

[richardlau]

Yes, I think we should plan to remove it along with the remaining Ubuntu 14.04 hosts: https://ci.nodejs.org/search/?q=ubuntu1404

I think we should reimage the replaced Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 with Ubuntu 20.04 (which I don't think we currently have any of in the CI) and/or additional Ubuntu 18.04 hosts. We bumped the minimum gcc/g++ to 8.3.0 for Node.js 16 and the default gcc/g++ on Ubuntu 18.04 is 7.5.0 while I believe it is 9 on Ubuntu 20.04.

The general plan to remove a platform from the CI is to first remove the labels referring to it from all jobs that are using it (as complications arise if you remove all the hosts with a label that jobs still refer to).

What may require more planning is that some of the infra machines are Ubuntu 16.04. Also the benchmarking machines which are hosted at Nearform and not on a cloud provider (maybe we'd need to do an in-place OS update on those?).

[targos]

What may require more planning is that some of the infra machines are Ubuntu 16.04.

For example, the download server is 16.04.

[richardlau]

As are the servers running the public and release Jenkins servers.

[rvagg]

+1 to ditching 16.04 for 20.04 .. except for the infra machines, which are complicated to upgrade and need to be done with care. We probably need to set aside some time where we can prepare for, and warn about downtime. We first need to make sure we have all our backups in place before we mess with them and then we need to decide whether we upgrade in-place or re-provision and re-setup (hard-mode).

[richardlau]

Well we've had to rebuild the release-ci server (hard-mode)(#2626). The replacement is Ubuntu 18.04 so that's one less server to worry about.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open many days with no activity. It will be closed soon unless the stale label is removed or a comment is made.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open many days with no activity. It will be closed soon unless the stale label is removed or a comment is made.

[richardlau]

Looking at the inventory, there are four remaining ubuntu1604 labelled machines.

• Two of them are infra- labelled. Of those one is actually running Ubuntu 22.04 (it was upgraded in Update www server to Ubuntu >=18.04 #3564) and the other is due for migration (New Machine requirement: Replacement for Equinix x64 servers #3597) where it will make sense to provision the replacement with something more modern (cc @ryanaslett).
• The remaining two are test machines at Rackspace. I'll convert those to something else. Given the available options I tentatively plan to convert one to Debian 12 and the other one to Ubuntu 22.04. That would give three total Debian 12 x64 machines (spread across DigitalOcean, IBM Cloud and Rackspace), and five Ubuntu 22.04 x64 machines (I may later repurpose one of those to rhel9 x64 to balance the CI a bit).