RHEL9 Likely To Drop Older x86_64 CPUs, Fedora Can Better Prepare With "Enterprise Linux Next"

[TemplarGR]

AVX2 is a better cut-off point, as it implies a few other extensions as well: BMI1/2, FMA + F16C, MOVBE, ...

Yes, it implies those, but it excludes a lot of currently working hardware. That is why the first AVX is a far better compromise for the near future. Up to now all x64 distros supported cpus since Pentium 4 era, it is a little too large of a step to get from that to AVX2 only so suddenly.

[Delgarde]

Enterprises are slow to upgrade processors.

While true, they're also slow to upgrade the OS as long as it remains supported... so if RHEL 9 imposes this limitation, it won't really matter since most of their users will continue with RHEL7 or 8 until they replace the hardware anyway. Related to this, enterprise vendors can be quite slow to support new OS versions (e.g. I don't think Oracle supports RHEL 8 yet), so even new hardware installations today may not be using the latest OS...

[drakonas777]

Yes, it implies those, but it excludes a lot of currently working hardware. That is why the first AVX is a far better compromise for the near future. Up to now all x64 distros supported cpus since Pentium 4 era, it is a little too large of a step to get from that to AVX2 only so suddenly.

I do not agree. Benefits of using AVX2 instead AVX are more important, than extra few years in backwards compatibility for already quite old hardware. I would 100% agree with you if this restriction would apply to all (I mean literally all, not RH based) distros. However, we are basically talking one server distro here (and it's beta testing companion (joke)). So it's fine in my opinion - tradeoff is adequate.

TBH either way the most affected group of people by this most likely would be users of entry level PC hardware, which even now does not support AVX due market segmentation.

Also, I saw someone's comment about being consistent with big iron OS. Being consistent with big iron ISA should also be a part of this philosophy IMHO.

[hotaru]

Came here expecting people to be defending their ancient hardware (like usual with these articles) and wasn't let down.

Coffee Lake Pentiums and Celerons are ancient?

[kpedersen]

As others have said, RHEL is for servers anyway, not outdated and/or low end consumer machines.

https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-...ux-workstation

Can you explain why that URL has "workstation" on the end?

Perhaps RH made a typo? XD

We have RHEL on all of the HR machines and none on the servers. This is because we have an explicit license with them for thin clients. The thing about thin clients is that they don't need to be running the latest hardware.

That said, since Wayland is going to completely fsck up remote sessions...

[Isedonde]

Well, I feel like my Phenom 2 X4 955 is still good enough, so I haven't gotten anything newer yet. If my distro of choice starts dropping hardware support, I will get hardware that is a bit more modern, maybe something from 2015. No big deal.

[szymon_g]

Came here expecting people to be defending their ancient hardware (like usual with these articles) and wasn't let down.

As others have said, RHEL is for servers anyway, not outdated and/or low end consumer machines.

even now you can easily buy new hardware lacking that instruction set.
if they are for servers, why do they include gnome etc?

[andre30correia]

not hate, if was Canonical I only can imagine. But its a Ibm company nobody cares

[kpedersen]

not hate, if was Canonical I only can imagine. But its a Ibm company nobody cares

Well so far, IBM has only dropped hardware that we might still use. Canonical would do that whilst displaying adverts on your apps menu for newer hardware XD

[skeevy420]

I think the cutoff should be AES support -- one generation before AVX (using Intel as the metric) which means anything from around 2010+ should be good enough.