Drop support for 32bit x86 linux and windows #13650
Open
Conversation
This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Going into Qiskit 2.0 we decided to drop support for windows 32 bit and linux i686 platforms. Right now the maintainence burden for continuing to support these platforms is becoming increasingly high, as we're increasing writing low level rust code to improve performance where we have to limit ourselves to continue to ensure 32bit platforms work. The user base for these platforms is quite small small; in the last 150 there were only 7 downloads for i686 out of 221,992 total downloads from PyPI (there is no metadata field in PyPI's database to differentiate between windows 32bit and 64bit if the CPU is 64bit capable it uses AMD64 for the CPU field), 5 downloads where the CPU type was: "x86" (I'm not sure which platform uses that string, linux uses x86_64 for 64bit intel, but i686, i586, i486, etc for 32bit systems), and 35 downloads were armv7l which is not an official supported platform but is 32bit and you could build from source (this is typically raspberry pi users). When combining this with the lack of wider ecosystem support for 32bit platforms, numpy, scipy, etc all have dropped 32bit support already, keeping support for 32bit platforms is no longer tenable. This commit updates the wheel building configuration to drop the 32bit platform builds and adds a release note documenting the change in status for these platforms in 2.0. A separate Qiskit/documentation PR will be opened to update our platform support documentation here: https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/guides/install-qiskit#operating-system-support closer to the final 2.0 release to remove the 32bit platforms from the list. Although we likely should update that page to have a subsection for 2.x and 1.x while both are supported.
mtreinish
added
documentation
|
One or more of the following people are relevant to this code:
|
jakelishman
reviewed
Jan 10, 2025
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I'll be happy to see the back of the 32-bit platforms now; it's rather easier to reason about when everything's the same, especially since there's ever more places where we're getting very concerned about the exact alignments, padding bits, and whatnot implicit in pointers.
Pull Request Test Coverage Report for Build 12712142919Details
💛 - Coveralls |
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Summary
Going into Qiskit 2.0 we decided to drop support for windows 32 bit and linux i686 platforms. Right now the maintainence burden for continuing to support these platforms is becoming increasingly high, as we're increasing writing low level rust code to improve performance where we have to limit ourselves to continue to ensure 32bit platforms work. The user base for these platforms is quite small small; in the last 150 there were only 7 downloads for i686 out of 221,992 total downloads from PyPI (there is no metadata field in PyPI's database to differentiate between windows 32bit and 64bit if the CPU is 64bit capable it uses AMD64 for the CPU field), 5 downloads where the CPU type was: "x86" (I'm not sure which platform uses that string, linux uses x86_64 for 64bit intel, but i686, i586, i486, etc for 32bit systems), and 35 downloads were armv7l which is not an official supported platform but is 32bit and you could build from source (this is typically raspberry pi users). When combining this with the lack of wider ecosystem support for 32bit platforms, numpy, scipy, etc all have dropped 32bit support already, keeping support for 32bit platforms is no longer tenable. This commit updates the wheel building configuration to drop the 32bit platform builds and adds a release note documenting the change in status for these platforms in 2.0.
A separate Qiskit/documentation PR will be opened to update our platform support documentation here:
https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/guides/install-qiskit#operating-system-support
closer to the final 2.0 release to remove the 32bit platforms from the list. Although we likely should update that page to have a subsection for 2.x and 1.x while both are supported.
Details and comments