On Mon, 2 May 2022, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:
Hi
Am 02.05.22 um 12:16 schrieb Richard Biener:
On Mon, 2 May 2022, Stefan Dirsch wrote:
On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 11:24:05AM +0200, Richard Biener wrote:
On Mon, 2 May 2022, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
Hi all,
what is the minimal suitable CPU type for openSUSE Tumbleweed (I know that i586 is deprecated / less supported, but I guess there is still a "minimal viable target system" for it)?
I updated a Pentium-M (Dothan, probably) based Toughbook CF-51 and after finding that I need "rodata=off" kernel parameter for the kernel to even boot, it fails miserably later in userspace apparently (it just hangs).
So before I'm filing bug reports, the question is if this is still supposed to work.
I'm not aware of any concious limit set apart from some CPU features supported only by some Pentiums and up for atomics. The concious limits probably come from the kernel and kernel folks could clarify there (but you should be fine there).
But of course nowadays everybody assumes 64bit and SSE2 as Thomas said so things tend to bitrot.
At least with regards to Mesa the decision to require SSE2 has been an decision by intention. ;-)
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/9868
[...] What does this mean for users? On Linux raises the default minimum processor spec to SSE2 supporting CPUs
Intel requirements raise from P5 (1993) to Netburst (2000) AMD requirements raise from Athlon(1999/2000) to Athlon 64 (2003) Via requirements raise from C3(2001) to C7 (2005) [...]
I think there was another component/tool, which requires SSE2 now? Was it rust? I can't remember. I think it was something, which has been invented long after SSE2 was avaialble ...
OK, I suppose on https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/ the System Requirements for the 32bit version could be clarified. IIRC some of the codecs in Firefox even assume AVX and 32bit support is spotty so eventually advertising the 32bit version less by targeting "vintage" systems only would help.
Having seen this discussion about 32-bit support several times, I'm wondering if we should remove all packages with SSE2 from the official repos. Most of upstream seems to have given up on it anyway.
For the affected components, the installer could still offer a link to optional repositories on OBS; with a clear message about the additional HW requirements.
The problem is of course identifying packages that do not support systems without CPU feature X (in this case X == SSE2). Presence of SSE2 instruction is not a good enough indication (the usage could be cpuid gated). Richard. -- Richard Biener <rguenther@suse.de> SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany; GF: Ivo Totev; HRB 36809 (AG Nuernberg)