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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Mario Junior]

Just drop for CPUs without SSE4.x.

Profit!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[andre30correia]

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

[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?