On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 04:29, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 05:34:02PM -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Earlier this week, I was helping with processing features for openSUSE
> Leap 15.4[1] and I discovered that they're planning on introducing
> x86_64-v2 to openSUSE soon. The reference for this change was that
> RHEL 9 is going to use x86_64-v2[2]. Additionally, other distributions
> have been considering bumping up to v2 or v3[3][4].
>
> Some cursory examination of the new x86_64 sublevels seem to indicate
> that x86_64-v2 goes back to roughly 2007~2008, merely cutting off the
> first couple of generations of x86_64 CPUs from Intel and AMD. I
> personally don't have any computers that don't have support for
> x86_64-v2 anymore.
Yes, you loose primarily Intel Conroe and Penryn generations and
AMD Opteron Gen 1 -> Gen 3. I doubt this is a significant portion
of Fedora installs.
Slight tangent but I find Fedora's approach to hardware somewhat
at odds with our approach to software.
On the one hand we portray our project as a place for cutting
edge Linux software & innovation.
On the other hand we hold back our software by trying to keep
supporting long obsolete hardware.
I think it comes down to what various people who maintain or help maintain large amounts of hardware have available to use or feel comfortable using. People in academia usually have tight capex budgets and when they get a system they like, they are probably going to be using it for decades. [Queue several universities in the last 10 years I have seen where people have computers older than they are on their desks as their work computer.] Other people have other concerns and find newer systems not able to meet them (screen may be wrong, keyboard feels wrong, their lab is still running N year old hardware etc.) [Looking at the many internal mailing lists where people would prefer not to have their hardware updated every 3 years but still pine for that 10 year old computer they started with and none of the others have been as good as.]
Finally, most of the changes in the architecture code don't really make things 'faster' in ways that 'matter'. Using AVX2 versus SSE2 versus SSE does not make compilations faster
There is of course always a balance between bumping min hardware
specs and the impact on maintainers & users, but I'm not convinced
that we have the balance right in targeting our x86_64 baseline at
the very first generation of 64-bit CPUs from 15 years ago. I can't
imagine such old CPUs makes up a significant portion of our users.
In this case it doesn't 'matter' it is a small segment of users. It is a segment of our maintainers who are. We either have to listen to them, 'fire them', or buy them replacement hardware. Since we are already overloaded, firing them has not been on the table. Buying replacement hardware is expensive in multiple ways (time, capex, and various legal aspects). That leaves listening to the maintainers.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Flame wars in sci.astro.orion. I have seen SPAM filters overload because of Godwin's Law. All those moments will be lost in time... like posts on BBS... time to reboot.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Flame wars in sci.astro.orion. I have seen SPAM filters overload because of Godwin's Law. All those moments will be lost in time... like posts on BBS... time to reboot.
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