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

[pal666]

Enabling the AVX2 compilation flag for the code which was not written to take advantage of this extension won't automatically increase performance. Just saying.

i'm glad you are not writing compilers

[pal666]

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.

because noone of commentators is using rhel on their junk intel laptop, so it doesn't matter to anyone?

[pal666]

this circus of chasing slighly less ancient hardware is such a waste of resources. one would think redhat has engineers who are able to defer binding of codegen options to host cpu to install time or run time

[carewolf]

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.

That's the same as a SSE4.2 cutoff. And would work on all currently produced mainstream processors.

[Sonadow]

That kind of stinks.

I have a dual Xeon workstation that belongs to the Ivy Bridge era. It still runs rings around today's consumer hardware by virtue of its 192GB memory and dual processor setup, and is only beaten by the Core X and Threadripper HEDT families.

In addition, I have three low-cost Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake laptops that I bought from China at extremely low prices, and I fully intend to get a few more as spares due to their prices. They are excellent for daily computing such as email, writing, light Wiresharking / TCPdump and Chrome Remote Desktop (only for controlling another person's computer, not the other way round since it does not work on Wayland). And both Lakes do not have AVX. Those laptops are currently running Debian 10 on Wayland/

If Fedora is going to mandate AVX or AVX2 it's going to cut out a whole bunch of hardware that is fully capable of running a modern Linux distribution without performance issues. Especially on my dual Xeon.

[jabl]

VMWare has already sunsetted anything prior to 2010 (Westmere) due to missing instructions for virtualization. I wonder how much virtio stuff for KVM can be taken out for anything less than IvyBridge or Opteron Bulldozer.

KVM has always required hardware virtualization support. Now that such hardware support is ubiquitous it certainly makes sense for VMWare to follow suit and drop support for legacy hosts.

[ssokolow]

this circus of chasing slighly less ancient hardware is such a waste of resources. one would think redhat has engineers who are able to defer binding of codegen options to host cpu to install time or run time

Let's assume that companies were willing to run "Gentoo, but with a Red Hat support contract behind it", including all the "wait for it to compile at install time" and "QA combinatorial explosion" implications of that.

Supporting a forest of them could be an even bigger waste of resources because compiling, storing, and sending countless variations on the same binary isn't free.

Though, to be fair to you, you did just basically argue for compiling the entire OS to WebAssembly, so it's not 100% out of the question.

[pal666]

Let's assume that companies were willing to run "Gentoo, but with a Red Hat support contract behind it", including all the "wait for it to compile at install time"

i never said "compiled at install time". i said "bound"(options to arch), leaving mechanism unspecified. one way is to download relevant build

and "QA combinatorial explosion" implications of that.

first, with working compiler result should be identical. second, they can easily designate some variant as primary and others as "use at your own risk(or pay for it)".

Supporting a forest of them could be an even bigger waste of resources because compiling, storing, and sending countless variations on the same binary isn't free.

compiling is essentially free(it's done once per millions of downloads). storage is cheap and sending doesn't depend on number of variants. and nothing demands "countless" variants, any number greater than 1 is better than 1

Though, to be fair to you, you did just basically argue for compiling the entire OS to WebAssembly, so it's not 100% out of the question.

no, i didn't argue for that. it can be used as implementation, but i'm afraid quality of implementation would siffer. same reason why jit sucks - (optimizing)compilation takes time

[ssokolow]

i never said "compiled at install time". i said "bound"(options to arch), leaving mechanism unspecified. one way is to download relevant build

My mistake. Still, that multiplies the compilation time and storage space on Red Hat's end every time they update a package, rather than just discussing it once for all packages periodically.

first, with working compiler result should be identical.

Theory and practice are two different things. For them to be the same requires a level of discipline and quality control from the upstream developers which you just can't rely on in the real world.

second, they can easily designate some variant as primary and others as "use at your own risk(or pay for it)".

In which case, the question reverts to "Why doesn't Red Hat think this is a profitable way to burn their CPU cycles and storage budget?"

compiling is essentially free(it's done once per millions of downloads). storage is cheap and sending doesn't depend on number of variants. and nothing demands "countless" variants, any number greater than 1 is better than 1

OK, it should be easy for you to convince Red Hat of that, then.

no, i didn't argue for that. it can be used as implementation, but i'm afraid quality of implementation would siffer. same reason why jit sucks - (optimizing)compilation takes time

Again, my mistake... but WebAssembly isn't JIT. JIT has to optimize quickly enough to keep the program from juddering. WebAssembly compilation is meant to sit behind a potential progress bar at install or first-run time.

[skeevy420]

That kind of stinks.

I have a dual Xeon workstation that belongs to the Ivy Bridge era. It still runs rings around today's consumer hardware by virtue of its 192GB memory and dual processor setup, and is only beaten by the Core X and Threadripper HEDT families.

In addition, I have three low-cost Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake laptops that I bought from China at extremely low prices, and I fully intend to get a few more as spares due to their prices. They are excellent for daily computing such as email, writing, light Wiresharking / TCPdump and Chrome Remote Desktop (only for controlling another person's computer, not the other way round since it does not work on Wayland). And both Lakes do not have AVX. Those laptops are currently running Debian 10 on Wayland/

If Fedora is going to mandate AVX or AVX2 it's going to cut out a whole bunch of hardware that is fully capable of running a modern Linux distribution without performance issues. Especially on my dual Xeon.

Yeah, I have dual Xeon Westmeres myself.

There's a reason I picked AES as the cutoff line -- it was the feature introduced with my processors