OpenBLAS Deciding Whether To Drop Support For Russia's Elbrus CPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenBLAS Deciding Whether To Drop Support For Russia's Elbrus CPUs

OpenBLAS recently added support for Russia's Elbrus E2000 processors, however, the OpenBLAS developers are now debating whether to drop support for these Russian domestically-produced CPUs given Russia's invasion into Ukraine...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenBLAS-Russia-Elbrus-Issue

[uid313]

Is there Elbrus support in GCC, LLVM or glibc/musl/uClibc?
In the Linux kernel or BSD?

[rabcor]

How hard can it be to keep politics out of software development? They'd need to be mentally ill to consider something like this, as it benefits absolutely nobody, certainly not Ukraine...

I suppose it's a good thing that it's open source then and someone can just fork it and add support for such cpus back in if they need it, I've felt like the open source community has been slipping ever since more and more politics that have absolutely nothing to do with free software or software development have been snuck in by some loudmouth sjws.

Politics don't belong here, besides ones related to software, particularly rights of software users and software developers. Maybe with a little stretching we could even go as far as to add things like right to repair and other hardware related htings since those are at least strongly related.

But which country is at war with what country? It's got nothing to do with software, never has, and certainly shouldn't start now.

[schmidtbag]

I don't see the benefit in what they're doing here. They're not going to stop Russia's efforts, especially since the situation with Ukraine likely won't take long enough to see any impact. But, since they've publicized the idea of dropping support, I'm sure this will be the end of their contract regardless. Russia seems to have a very low tolerance for those who express opposition.

[Ilfirin]

Next time, when US comes to liberate next country like Afghanistan, will the AMD an Intel be dropped? Just asking.

[blacknova]

I think this could be the start of oss downward spiral if accepted. What would be next? Removal of Russian developers contributions? Chinese next? Etc….

[piotrj3]

It should be removed just for diffrent reason.

Not political, but simply that there isn't "free" userspace that can use it. There isn't a reason why OpenBLAS developers are supposed to maintain it, or even accept upstream of that unless those processors reach public use.

If i google Elbrus E2000 there simply isn't anything like how I can buy it, where is development manuals, boards with it etc. There is only !!! 6 google pages of results and most are related to OpenBLAS itself... Why I should maintain something so niche?

[er888kh]

I think this could be the start of oss downward spiral if accepted. What would be next? Removal of Russian developers contributions? Chinese next? Etc….

There are already some restrictions going on. For example, people in Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran should not use fedora according to their Legal/Export page in fedoraproject.org

[vladpetric]

It's a really crappy VLIW CPU ... The only reason you'd ever want to use it is if you have no other options (e.g., you're in Russia and can't buy anything good).

[ssokolow]

There are already some restrictions going on. For example, people in Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran should not use fedora according to their Legal/Export page in fedoraproject.org

Just to clarify, I'm pretty sure that's because U.S. law prohibits "exporting" "weapons technology" like SSL/TLS to countries on a blacklist of "terrorist-supporting" nations, which those countries are on. Any American company or U.S. citizen is bound by that.