On Samstag, 8. Oktober 2022 16:54:13 CEST Larry Len Rainey wrote:
My 2 cents - sorry to flog a dead horse
We support obsolete CPU's (IBM mainframes, Power PC, ARM (raspberry PI)) - do we even have enough users of these platforms to justify that development?
ARMv6/v7 IMHO is not in a very good state, many packages are not even compiling any more. On the other hand, it does not matter much, there is no official support, and build failures does not affect other architectures. You might not aware of it, but IBM mainframes and PPC64 are current hardware. And IBM is a partner of SUSE, and there is likely a lot of money involved to keep these platforms supported.
Why would we stop supporting working x86-64 machines that have enough cpu and disk to be useful. I think that any machine that supports SATA 3 drives should still be supported until SATA drives are no longer made.
I still think that the answer is a repo for v1 and one for v4 builds - give those that want the new hardware a proper speedup and keep those that are fine as it is a choice.
Putting v2 and v3 in the same bin as x86_64 baseline (there is no such thing like v1 or v0) and only optimizing for v4 is kind of stupid. Most of the baseline hardware has been decommisioned already (look at what you get today when looking for refurbished hardware - 2nd to 7th generation Intel i3/5/7), and is more and more likely to just fail. v2 and v3 are common today, while v4 is probably almost as rare as baseline. All processors from AMD and Intel released in the last 11/10 years are level v2 or better. Most of the older processors support only DDR2 (a few support DDR3) and PCIe 2.0. Leap 16 is not released today, but likely sometime in 2023. Most hardware in 2023 will be v2 or better, and during the next ten years this will only go up.
Leave the non-v2 to v4 machines a life. I hate to have to migrate all ny friends with old machines to versions that want to keep old hardware working like sparky linux or mint linux.
These will be still supported with Leap 15.5. Nobody forces you to migrate to Leap 16. Refurbished hardware which supports v2 (including SSD, 8 GB of RAM, 4th Gen Intel i5 Quadcore, i.e. v3) is available today for well below 200€.
Quit being like Microsoft and want people to buy new hardware for features 99% of users will never use.
99% of users will use SSE3/SSE4*, as the software and hardware supports it. 99% of users have bought sufficient hardware during the last 10 years. Regards, Stefan