CentOS Hyperscale SIG Now Has An Intel-Optimized Repository

The CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is focused on providing new packages and features atop CentOS Stream for use by hyperscalers like Meta and Twitter have now established a "hyperscale-intel" repository for Intel-optimized packages.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG has been providing newer versions of systemd and Kpatch, getting behind efforts like RPM + Btrfs CoW, and backing other features not yet found in CentOS (Stream) itself but is of interest/value to large scale deployments of this Linux distribution.

Today the CentOS Hyperscale SIG published their Q1'2023 status report where they laid out their updates to the Linux kernel and systemd, their ongoing container image generation, and other updates. One of the new items though is now "hyperscale-intel" as a new Intel repository for optimized packages.

At the moment the CentOS Hyperscale Intel repository for CentOS Stream 8 / 9 is quite bare and just shipping an optimized Zlib package. That optimized Zlib package has two alternative hash implementations geared for running on AVX2-capable processors. Aside from SSE4.2 and AVX2 tuning, there are no other reported differences with the Zlib package at this time.

It will be quite interesting to see what else ends up in this hyperscale-intel repository if any other AVX2 (or AVX-512) optimized packages land here, if Intel's any juicy performance optimization patches become available here early, any Clear optimizations are transferred over, etc. With Intel's vast software engineering resources, there could be a lot of interesting potential from this new repository that the growing number of CentOS deployments could stand to benefit from when running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

I'll certainly be following for changes to the hyperscale-intel repository. More details on the CentOS Hyperscale efforts via the CentOS blog. Details on the CentOS Hyperscale Intel repository for access via this documentation.