openSUSE Tumbleweed Begins Transitioning To x86-64-v2 CPU Requirements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: openSUSE Tumbleweed Begins Transitioning To x86-64-v2 CPU Requirements

Similar to SUSE/openSUSE's Adaptable Linux Platform requiring x86-64-v2 CPU support, the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed is beginning to transition to require x86-64-v2 micro-architecture support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-x86-64-v2

[birdie]

I'm mostly OK with this as long as there are supported/maintained distros which are compiled with support for older CPUs.

After all if you have such an old system you wouldn't use it as your desktop PC anyways considering how bloated current DEs and web browsers are.

Just a reminder, Nehalem was released 14 years ago, with the most famous CPUs of the lineup being the Core i7 870 (4-core, 8 threads)/Core i5 750 (4 cores).

[milkylainen]

I'm mostly OK with this as long as there are supported/maintained distros which are compiled with support for older CPUs.

After all if you have such an old system you wouldn't use it as your desktop PC anyways considering how bloated current DEs and web browsers are.

Just a reminder, Nehalem was released 14 years ago, with the most famous CPUs of the lineup being the Core i7 870 (4-core, 8 threads)/Core i5 750 (4 cores).

Agreed. But there is a but.
Now I could be talking out of my ass here, but the situation doesn't seem clear cut?
I find x86_64 baselines to be... difficult (messy perhaps is better?)
Wasn't there a lot of holes in v2 implementations, (sse 4.2 etc?).
v4 seem to require AVX512, which Intel just ditched?

[arun54321]

meh. just move to V3 already.

[V1tol]

meh. just move to V3 already.

AVX2 on some first processors (Intel) has performance penalty in terms of CPU frequency and switching overhead.

[ryao]

AVX2 on some first processors (Intel) has performance penalty in terms of CPU frequency and switching overhead.

Did you confuse AVX2 with AVX512?

[JS987]

meh. just move to V3 already.

Some recent CPUs like Intel Pentium N6000 (2021) only supports SSE4.2.

[bug77]

I'm mostly OK with this as long as there are supported/maintained distros which are compiled with support for older CPUs.

After all if you have such an old system you wouldn't use it as your desktop PC anyways considering how bloated current DEs and web browsers are.

Just a reminder, Nehalem was released 14 years ago, with the most famous CPUs of the lineup being the Core i7 870 (4-core, 8 threads)/Core i5 750 (4 cores).

Just what I wanted to post: I wish all distros would do this more often and we had one or two distros specifically geared towards older hardware. However, I'm afraid if we did that, very few developers would care about making sure the software runs on these distros, so the only way to keep it running would an increasingly higher number of distro-specific patches. Oh well...

[torsionbar28]

Just a reminder, Nehalem was released 14 years ago, with the most famous CPUs of the lineup being the Core i7 870 (4-core, 8 threads)/Core i5 750 (4 cores).

FWIW desktop CPU architecture is largely irrelevant. It's the server CPUs that drive Linux distro requirements. All the big commercial distros like RHEL, SLES, etc. all target the server markets. Intel did have plenty of 8 and 10 core Xeon sku's from Nehalem era, which is still capable hardware today for many business and hypervisor workloads.

As another example, I have a 16 core Opteron 6380. With 128 GB of registered ECC memory. This is AMD Bulldozer, so x86-64 v2. It makes for a fantastic hypervisor. It's running ~20 linux VM's right now, with overall CPU utilization averaging around 20%. Recently upgraded it to Rocky 9. No plans to replace this hardware any time soon. Like the Xeon chips I mentioned, this is top-of-the-range hardware from its day, but it does demonstrate that x86-64 v2 is a reasonable baseline for the foreseeable future.

[Statix]

I'm mostly OK with this as long as there are supported/maintained distros which are compiled with support for older CPUs.

After all if you have such an old system you wouldn't use it as your desktop PC anyways considering how bloated current DEs and web browsers are.

Just a reminder, Nehalem was released 14 years ago, with the most famous CPUs of the lineup being the Core i7 870 (4-core, 8 threads)/Core i5 750 (4 cores).

CachyOS an Arched based distro autodetects x86-64-v3 microarchitecture and uses the optimized packages if available. I have only tried it in a VM, but it seems like the way to go.