Fedora 39 Plots Path For Intel Threaded Building Blocks Upgrade

Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) has been around for many years while with the recent shift to the oneAPI umbrella as oneTBB, in an effort to improve the usability and simplicity of the API they made a number of changes to its interfaces as well as having removed some previously common interfaces. This has led Fedora Linux to running on an older TBB version the past few years while for Fedora 39 later this year they are planning to modernize their Threaded Building Blocks packaging.

The past five Fedora Linux releases they have stuck to shipping the now three year old Threaded Building Blocks 2020.3 release due to backwards incompatible breakage following that release. Due to a number of software packages out there still depending upon the old TBB interface, there isn't a trivial path forward for upgrading the TBB packaging on Fedora.

A change proposal has been filed so that during the Fedora 39 cycle they can work on updating against oneTBB 2021.8 while keeping a compatibility package for TBB 2020.3 for software still depending upon the older version. The compatibility package will have the legacy headers installed in a different location so software not yet able to use the modern oneTBB API will need to be updated for the changed location of the headers. Installing the development files and run-time support for both the old and new (one)TBB will be possible on Fedora 39.

Those running Fedora and interested in Intel's Threaded Building Blocks for aiding in parallel programming can learn more about the proposed Fedora 39 change via the change proposal.