This page lists known minimum requirements for different operating systems and architectures. In line with the Porting Policy, support for old operating system and architecture versions may be removed in newer releases. Announcements for end of support are tracked in: issue 23011 for macOS, issue 52188 for Windows, and issue 60792 for Linux.
For Go 1.24 and later: Kernel version 3.2 or later.
We don't support CentOS 5. The kernel is too old (2.6.18).
For little-endian MIPS64, kernel version 4.1 is known to fail, and 4.8 works.
For loong64, kernel 5.19 and later versions work fine.
For the tinyconfig (i.e., make tinyconfig) Linux configuration for embedded systems, you must also enable CONFIG_FUTEX and CONFIG_EPOLL.
The QEMU user space emulator is an alternative implementation of the Linux system call interface used to enable running binaries from emulated architectures without emulating a full Linux kernel. Docker multi-platform builds often use the QEMU user space emulator. The QEMU user space emulator is not an officially supported platform, as it is not actually Linux. QEMU versions prior to 7.1.0 have known issues. If you encounter issues while using QEMU, see if the issue reproduces (a) with native Linux, and (b) on newer versions of QEMU.
On arm64, an out of date (lower than version 2.33) ld.gold may cause shared library tests to fail (see issue 28334).
For Go 1.21 and later: Windows 10 and higher or Windows Server 2016 and higher.
Go 1.25 and later only support macOS 12 Monterey or newer; see https://go.dev/doc/go1.25#darwin.
We have builders for macOS 12 through macOS 16 as of 2026-02-18.
The current officially supported -stable versions only.
Generally only the latest release version only. We have a builder, but it's not the most stable of our ports.
See Go on FreeBSD for supported FreeBSD/Architecture/Go versions matrix.
There are known NetBSD bugs (including kernel crashes) up to the current NetBSD 7.1. There is a reported fix in NetBSD 7.1.1 but it‘s unverified as of 2017-07-10, as we’re not running builders again yet. See https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.9#known_issues and https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20852
illumos (former OpenSolaris 10) based distributions or Oracle Solaris 11+.
iOS 12 or later.
For some architectures, Go supports compiling to specific microarchitectures using environment variables, e.g. GOAMD64 for go1.18 and later. Binaries will check at startup whether the requested microarchitecture level is supported. For example, a binary built with GOAMD64=v3 will fail on a CPU that doesn't have LZCNT support.
Various microarchitecture levels and the environment variables used to select them are described with each architecture.
The build cache understands the microarchitecture environment variables and does not require any cleaning if you change them.
While performance is expected to improve when a higher minimum microarchitecture is requested, this might not be true in all cases. Benchmark your performance-critical code to verify performance improvements.
Until Go 1.17, the Go compiler always generated x86 binaries that could be executed by any 64-bit x86 processor.
Go 1.18 introduced 4 architectural levels for AMD64. Each level differs in the set of x86 instructions that the compiler can include in the generated binaries:
Setting, for example, GOAMD64=v3, will allow the Go compiler to use AVX2 instructions in the generated binaries (which may improve performance in some cases); but these binaries will not run on older x86 processors that don't support AVX2.
The Go toolchain may also generate newer instructions, but guarded by dynamic checks to ensure they‘re only executed on capable processors. For example, with GOAMD64=v1, math/bits.OnesCount will still use the POPCNT instruction if CPUID reports that it’s available. Otherwise, it falls back to a generic implementation.
The Go toolchain does not currently generate any AVX512 instructions.
The race detector is not supported on platforms that do not provide SSE3.
Note that processor is a simplification in this context. In practice, support from the entire system (firmware, hypervisor, kernel) is needed.
See section Microarchitecture support for hints on how to use microarchitecture environment variables like GOAMD64.
See https://go.dev/doc/install/source#environment
See https://go.dev/doc/install/source#environment
Until Go 1.23, the Go compiler always generated ARM64 binaries that could be executed by any ARMv8-A processor.
Go 1.23 introduced a new GOARM64 environment variable, which specifies the minimum target version of the ARM64 architecture at compile time. Allowed values are v8.{0-9} and v9.{0-5}. This may be followed by an option specifying extensions implemented by target hardware. Valid options are ,lse and ,crypto.
Setting, for example, GOARM64=v8.0,lse, will allow the Go compiler to use LSE instructions in the generated binaries (which may improve performance in some cases); but these binaries will not run on older ARM64 processors that don’t support LSE.
The Go toolchain may also generate newer instructions, but guarded by dynamic checks to ensure they’re only executed on capable processors.
The GOARM64 environment variable defaults to v8.0.
POWER5 and above. Starting with Go 1.9, only POWER8 and above are supported.
POWER8 and above.
MIPS III or higher. Builder is using MIPS64r2.
MIPS III or higher in little endian mode.
z13
MIPS32r1
rv64g (rv64imafd). Starting from Go 1.23, RVA20U64 mandatory extensions is required.
Go 1.19 or above. the Go compiler always generated Loong64 binaries that could be executed any processor cored by LA364, LA464, LA664 or later.
For programs using cgo, gcc 4.6 or newer is required.
Starting with Go 1.25, use of CGO on Windows requires a C compiler that incorpoates support for DWARF 5. For those using GCC, this requirement translates to selecting a version of GCC built with binutils version 2.37 or later. Programs built with older versions of GCC (those using binutils 2.36 and earlier) will produce non-working executables, see issue 75077 for details.