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

[edwaleni]

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

Most enterprises install server RHEL with no gui to reduce the patching overhead and cut down on the attack vectors.

RHEL comes with lots of options that aren't always installed, like DPDK.

[M@GOid]

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

My tough exactly. Impressive how chill the comments are overhaul. If it was Canonical, people had already ripped their panties and called Shuttleworth the antichrist.

[Mario Junior]

Just drop for CPUs without SSE4.x.

Profit!

[MadeUpName]

The 4 or year old Celeron(R) CPU N3160 used in my HTPC has no AVX what so ever. It is untrue to say that RH is strictly a server distro as companies who ether want support or some one to sue if things go wrong also buy it. There is also the issue of Fedora being the proving ground for RH so if RH is dropping support for CPUs in the future Fedora will likely start dropping them soon. RH being one of the biggest contributors to the main line kernel could stop support there as well.

[jabl]

RH being one of the biggest contributors to the main line kernel could stop support there as well.

Eh, the upstream kernel still supports the i486, which hasn't been supported by Fedora for ages, and IIRC RHEL dropped support for 32-bit HW with the release of RHEL 7 in 2014.

[jabl]

Requiring AVX might be a bit much, considering Intel still sells non-AVX processors for market segmentation reasons. Yes, those low-end processors are not the target market of RHEL, but still.

That being said, bumping up the minimum required features would make sense. E.g. requiring about 2012 level hardware you get SSE 4.2, POPCNT, and AES-NI.

[StanGenchev]

I agree that the minimum requirement should be rised but the baseline should be an instruction set/feature of all CPU's from year 201x and upwards and not AVX/AVX2 which is found only in mid to high-end CPU's.

Both Intel and AMD are selling brand new processors which lack AVX support. Are they seriously trying to tell me that my brand new laptop with a last-gen Pentium CPU is "too-old" to run Fedora/RHEL/CentOS?

The company I work at, the companies at which many of my friends work at and in my personal life, RHEL is being used for both Workstation and server, so the statement that RHEL is server-only is quite ridiculous. And for anyone who might say "Just because YOU use it for that, does not mean it is MEANT to be used for that!", I would ask you to go to RedHat's website and see for yourself that RHEL is marketed as both Workstation and server.

So instead of fighting and splitting into "support everything" and "support only the newest high-end" groups, let us find a good middle ground. Personally I think that SSE4.2 is a good minimum requirement as there are no CPU's made after around 2012 that do not support it (at least not that I'm aware of, correct me if I'm wrong).

[SofS]

There seems to be some sort of misconception here. There is no way they do not know what families have or not some specific instruction set. On the contrary, for a serious organization like RedHat now part of IBM to consider it then it must mean that because they know their clients they know what instructions to target in principle.

The catch being what Michael pointed out, the QA related issues. And this is where this new build feedback tool makes sense, ideal for a QA test bed. For that matter I could easily see Fedora repositories mirroring the current ones except for enabling optimizations to the target instruction set they want to test, in a dumb manner, it will be for testing anyway, just replace one repository for another and give it a go to see what happens. First they will be able to look at the build problems related to enabling all these optimizations, then they could look for test user feedback. After a while, with the actual feedback on hands, then make a more qualified decision.

[sfx2000]

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.

Not really...

There's a lot of boxes still in the data center that run AMD64 w/o AVX - and these are more recent 22nm/14nm Intel SoC's - Rangely is a good example here, as a network oriented silvermont core. See these as cold-storage and edge computing platforms mostly - and being from a RedHat shop, one does like to keep things in a common environment.

Silvermont/Airmont - They are comparable to Westmere big cores, instruction sets...

I suspect there are a lot AMD's in a similar boat...

[sfx2000]

Just drop for CPUs without SSE4.x.

Profit!

No doubt - much like Apple dropping support for GPU's that don't support their Metal API - so Sandy Bridge and earlier are no longer supported by MacOS.

Spouse's MacBook Air 2011 got caught in that trap - at least with RedHat it's still useful... I suppose after 9 years of use, buying a new MacBook Air to replace it is reasonable to some, esp Apple