Support of Armv6 (early Raspberry Pi)

Summary

I have not been able to appropriately install GitLab Runners (since v16.8.0) on Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2 (armv6l) running Raspberry Pi OS 11 (Bullseye). However, I have been able to on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 (armv7l). I suspect this is due to updated Go tooling not supporting armv6l.

Steps to reproduce

sudo apt install gitlab-runner

Actual behavior

$ sudo apt install gitlab-runner
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
  docker-engine
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gitlab-runner
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 490 MB of archives.
After this operation, 532 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 https://packages.gitlab.com/runner/gitlab-runner/raspbian bullseye/main armhf gitlab-runner armhf 16.9.0-1 [490 MB]
Fetched 490 MB in 5min 56s (1,378 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package gitlab-runner.
(Reading database ... 51562 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../gitlab-runner_16.9.0-1_armhf.deb ...
Unpacking gitlab-runner (16.9.0-1) ...
Setting up gitlab-runner (16.9.0-1) ...
GitLab Runner: detected user gitlab-runner
Illegal instruction
Illegal instruction
Illegal instruction
dpkg: error processing package gitlab-runner (--configure):
 installed gitlab-runner package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 132
Errors were encountered while processing:
 gitlab-runner
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Expected behavior

Success from installation.

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

This is appropriately covered in the "Actual behavior" section.

Environment description

$ uname -a
Linux pi1brev2a 6.1.21+ #1642 Mon Apr  3 17:19:14 BST 2023 armv6l GNU/Linux

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Raspbian
Description:    Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release:        11
Codename:       bullseye

$ cat /proc/device-tree/model
Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2

Used GitLab Runner version

Issues are with 16.8.0 and 16.9.0 (note that I cannot install them so I cannot run them with the --version flag to grab additional information. The logs above indicate version "16.9.0-1".

Possible fixes

It may be necessary to replace the gox build tool with something else that supports different target platforms (GOARM=armv6,armv7, etc.), and build different packages to distinguish between armv6 and armv7.
Changes to Go v1.21 from v1.20 may have impacted things.
Useful links with additional information supporting previous bullets:
- binaries
- Arm Illegal Instruction When Trying to Install
- Illegal instruction on Raspberry Pi with arm version
- Only support Armv6 on Arm platforms
- Reproducible Builds in Go
  - Host architecture. Go runs on a variety of ARM systems and can emit code using a software library for floating-point math (SWFP) or using hardware floating-point instructions (HWFP). Toolchains defaulting to one mode or the other will necessarily differ. Like we saw with the dynamic linker earlier, the Go bootstrap process inspected the build system to make sure that the resulting toolchain worked on that system. For historical reasons, the rule was “assume SWFP unless the build is running on an ARM system with floating-point hardware”, with cross-compiled toolchains assuming SWFP. The vast majority of ARM systems today do have floating-point hardware, so this introduced an unnecessary difference between natively compiled and cross-compiled toolchains, and as a further wrinkle, Windows ARM builds always assumed HWFP, making the decision operating system-dependent. We changed the rule to be “assume HWFP unless the build is running on an ARM system without floating-point hardware”. This way, cross-compilation and builds on modern ARM systems produce identical toolchains.
GitLab Forum initial topic
Inputs and recommendations from @dnsmichi