RedHat has been so obnoxious I moved from Fedora to Debian.
I’ve seen a lot of tech bro “Shove our crap into everything and make sure it is too hard to not use it so we become the new Microslop” kinda crap coming out of them to want anything to do with it.
Red Hat I get, but why Fedora? Other than getting some of its funding and open source code from RHEL, it’s largely unrelated projects.
The key reason for doing this, as stated in the article:
ultimately they say “the straw that broke the camel’s back” to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their industrial accelerator-control computers was the “-march=x86-64-v2” compiler flag default as “forced obsolescence” for old hardware.
From what I understand, the v2 option requires relatively newer CPU instruction sets, making it incompatible with some older CPUs, even 64 bit ones. I don’t know what is gained by using the v2 flag, but I would imagine that it may be something performance-related, by more fully utilizing those newer instruction sets.
I initially followed on their plans for that thing and from what I remember, they were going to include the older ones too.
But I’d think they would at least be willing to do something trivial like a rebuild for a big name like CERN, if they just called ‘support’.
“trivial”, because it doesn’t require many expensive man-hours, just an additional entry in whatever batch build config they use.
Here is the explanation from redhat
It’s worth noting that the archlinux devs found very little benefit for switching to v2 in their benchmarks (not that a benchmark ever covers every usecase) https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2021-March/048739.html. v3 has significantly more notable benefits but you loose even more hardware support.
Thanks for the links with additional information!
x86-64-v2 gives you guaranteed support for SSE3, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2, which is relatively old, we’re talking CPUs from 2008. The real boost comes with x86-64-v3 which gives you AVX.
*exists in Gentoo with
-march=native*Thanks.
V2/V3/V4 are the microarchitectures to enable e.g. glibc to search for optimum libraries for the target platform.
x86-64 was drafted in 2000 and up until like 2020 or something, there was no way to discern microarchitecture differences to optimise compilation. So v2 is basically just anything since 2008.
Why Red Hat are moving on from “v1” - likely because they’re spending huge amount of resources maintaining binaries for that old microarchitecture and the cost dwarfs the revenue they’re making from continuing to support it.
With the security vulnerabilities found in older chips that require either a revised architecture or otherwise take huge performance penalties to mitigate (e.g. Meltdown and Spectre), most enterprise customers upgraded their hardware older than 2008 in recent years.
Thankfully this is Linux so while RHEL is moving on, Debian are still maintaining support for old architectures!
Whereas Windows 11 23H2 onwards killed x86-64-v1 support entirely.
Thanks for the additional details.
With the security vulnerabilities found in older chips that require either a revised architecture or otherwise take huge performance penalties to mitigate (e.g. Meltdown and Spectre), most enterprise customers upgraded their hardware older than 2008 in recent years.
Are you sure this is really one of the reasons? I thought that Meltdown and Spectre affected much newer CPUs, so that v1/v2 didn’t line up with that. The Wikipedia article on Meltdown says up to 2018 CPUs. The one on Spectre says all pre-2019 CPUs that use branch prediction.
Meltdown and Spectre got fixed in hardware? That’s news to me.
*mitigated in hardware
The fix would be redesigning x86, i thonk?
The freedom of forking is just like market freedom: a farce that hides the economic and political power needed to do so. When will you liberals learn? The fucking CERN didn’t have such power.
Have you ever had the experience of having a short conversation with someone but you can’t figure out what they mean? Like, the words they are saying make sense, and you can parse their sentences, but the meaning is incomprehensible?
Then you realize that they are part of a religion, political ideology, or some other subculture that you’re not deeply familiar with and it’s pretty clear that you just glimpsed 1% of the mental framework that they operate in, but because you don’t know what the other 99% is you can’t figure out if you agree, disagree, or just learned something?
Have also ever noticed that they tend to get Real Mad when you ask them question because the conversation quickly switches to in group/out group dynamics and you just revealed that you’re not in whatever group they are? And they also probably have very specific definitions of words and phrases as part of their mental framework that you don’t know, so both sides completely misunderstand each other?
Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is, what the fuck are you talking about Jessie?
Had you ever had the experience of not even having a conversation with someone because before the conversation even began the other person has already made a neat little strawman for themselves to attack your opinion without giving actual arguments?
Go ahead, make the fork
Oh, a stray dumbo on lemmy.
Wow! I could not have asked for a better example of this. The quick insult that might just be a simple attack on my intelligence but might also have a specific in-group meaning? It’s perfect! chef’s kiss
You sir/madam/theydam have made my day. I salute you.
Damn… They must be running a bunch of 20 years old hardware to not want that v2 march.
I would imagine that it may be something performance-related, by more fully utilizing those newer instruction sets.
Or they’re deprecating shit just because, the mantainer must be just a late zoomer that drank the cool aid saying that removing old hw support is the way to go.
Yeah. At CERN. That’s likely. Yep.
The distro isn’t kept by CERN
deleted by creator
Nah. Lennart went home to Microsoft.
I wonder why not switch to a RHEL clone like Alma which still complies for v2.
Edit: nevermind. I realize they still want v1 hardware, I thought this could have been about RHEL10 even removing support for v2.
They’re already using Alma. There are more complaints not just the compile flag.
The assholes that brought you the internet. Physicists and computer scientists SMH.
