Hi, I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but after the long discussion about using old systems, I wondered if we could get an idea about the number of users with then-obsolete machines. I couldn't find information about x86 CPU market share so I looked at Windows releases instead. Statcounter has information on that. [1] The worldwide stats looks something like this: Win11: ~16%; Win10: ~70%; Win8.x: ~3.5%; Win7: ~10%; WinXP: ~0.5% There's no clear connection between Windows releases and CPUs, so the metric is somewhat fuzzy. According to Wikipedia, Windows 7 was first released in 2009 and Windows 8 in 2012. x86-64-v2 was also released in 2009, but wasn't present in AMD CPUs until 2013. Assuming that Windows 7 systems don't support -v2, but Windows 8 systems do, around 10% of _possible_ would not be supported by dropping pre-v2. That might be worth the performance/feature gains or not; IDK. Windows 10 and -v3 were both first released in 2015. It's much less clear what the impact would be. Win 11 requires it, so at least 16% of the possible users could use it. On pre-Windows 10 systems, -v3 is probably not supported. And for Windows 10 systems, IDK. BTW it's worth to look at the regional stats for Windows usage. Africa and South America still have higher usage of older Windows releases, but only by a few percent. Interestingly Windows 7 still has a marketshare of ~23% in India. I guess this has been discussed already, but could '-v2' support be provided for selected packages only, while the default packages would remain at -v1? The installer would then suggest to enable an additional repo with those v2-packages that take precedence over their v1-builds. I assume that kernel, glibc, Mesa and BLAS could make use of the additional CPU features, but most packages probably not. (?) Or could we beef-up our support for the old i586 a bit, so that the -v1 systems could run this instead? In my experience, TW on i586 works well, except for those programs that use SSE2, which most of the i586 CPUs don't support. But -v0 always has SSE2. Best regards Thomas [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide... Am 23.11.22 um 16:22 schrieb Dominique Leuenberger / DimStar:
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
I'm sorry to bring up an old topic once again, but it is an important one and I believe we have found a solution that works for most users and still allows openSUSE Tumbleweed to move ahead. openSUSE Factory repository is be repurposed to move forward with x86-64-v2, and openSUSE:Factory:Intel will be set up as openSUSE Factory currently exists today. This change is necessary to align with the SUSE factory first policy (https://opensource.suse.com/legal/policy) to keep aligned with the project's sponsor's development efforts.
The discussed and agreed upon solution forward is the following:
Repurpose of Factory * openSUSE Tumbleweed main repository: + will move to x86-64-v2 (like ALP will) + i586 support will be dropped from the repository (i.e. only x86-64-v2 left) + -32bit packages as needed by wine and such will remain present (but no complete repo to be installed meaning only the necessary -32bit parts for specific packages will exist)
To become Old Factory * for users of legacy systems, we will introduce openSUSE:Factory:Intel, the same setup we have for ports like ARM, PowerPC, zSystems, RISCV. This repo will build packages for x86-64 (v1) plus i586, so basically what the current openSUSE:Factory repository does.
Community Actions Needed The :Intel port will require volunteers from the community to look after it. This will entail monitoring the builds, validating QA results (if not passing) and monitoring/pushing on bugs that are exclusive to these architectures
Actions for Users:
Users of V2 compatible machines Users will automatically be upgraded to x86-64-v2 flavors (which is what we want to happen for the majority of users)
Users who can't migrate to V2 and i586 users The repository list will need to be updated away from download.o.o/tumbleweed/repo/oss to something like download.o.o/ports/intel/tumblewed/repo/oss
With this solution, we provide benefits to users of more recent machines than that of V1 by using the newer CPU instructions (and staying aligned, and thus relevant, with ALP). Yet this provides a path for users to still run Tumbleweed on machines that might not have the needed hardware.
**Once the new intel port repository is ready, I'll let you know the exact location of it. We can expect for these changes to take place in the first quarter of the new year of 2023.**
Cheers, Dominique
-- Thomas Zimmermann Graphics Driver Developer SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev