[HN Gopher] Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available
        
       Author : laserstrahl
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2024-02-04 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.gentoo.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.gentoo.org)
        
       | dtech wrote:
       | If like me you were unaware of the "x86-64-v.." classification,
       | here is an overview:
       | https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/01/05/building-red-h...
        
         | throw0101a wrote:
         | See also:
         | 
         | > _In 2020, through a collaboration between AMD, Intel, Red
         | Hat, and SUSE, three microarchitecture levels (or feature
         | levels) on top of the x86-64 baseline were defined: x86-64-v2,
         | x86-64-v3, and x86-64-v4.[41][42] These levels define specific
         | features that can be targeted by programmers to provide
         | compile-time optimizations. The features exposed by each level
         | are as follows:[43]_
         | 
         | *
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...
        
           | o11c wrote:
           | Assuming APX[1] actually becomes a thing, that will be an
           | even more significant feature level.
           | 
           | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Advanced_Performance
           | _Ext...
        
       | snvzz wrote:
       | I wonder what happened to Arch Linux's sub-architecture support.
       | 
       | There was talk years ago about this. Pacman supposedly got
       | updates, and it was just a matter of kicking the building
       | infrastructure into gear.
       | 
       | But years passed, and still nothing.
        
         | GrayShade wrote:
         | There's a repo at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/unofficial_u
         | ser_repositorie..., but nothing new as far as I know.
         | 
         | I've used it for a while, ran into some minor issues from time
         | to time, but nothing critical.
        
         | jiripospisil wrote:
         | The newest status update I could find is this [0] but that's
         | over a year old too. Honestly I would rather if they worked on
         | providing ARM64 packages. I know about and use Arch Linux ARM
         | but that's a completely different project with different people
         | and even fewer resources, which often manifests in broken
         | packages (right now generating initramfs fails without manual
         | intervention [1]). I remember for a long time Arch Linux didn't
         | have any build servers and packagers mostly used their own
         | machines to build packages. Not sure what's the current state
         | of things but if that's still the case, then it's quite
         | understandable that not everybody has an ARM64 machine to build
         | on.
         | 
         | [0] https://lists.archlinux.org/hyperkitty/list/arch-dev-
         | public@...
         | 
         | [1] https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16672
        
           | Foxboron wrote:
           | It's all part of the same problem domain; How do we
           | rearchitecture the release process of Arch so we can support
           | multiple architectures.
           | 
           | The amount of people that understand this problem domain,
           | have the time+energy to work on it and is _actually_ able to
           | see it too completion is.. well. Not many.
           | 
           | I tried to hack on buildbot, as I wrote in that email, but I
           | have been questioning the maintainability of trying to fit
           | what we need on top of buildbot. In constrast to writing
           | _something_ from scratch.
        
             | jiripospisil wrote:
             | I wonder if something like that should be built on top of
             | GitLab now that you have migrated to it. GitLab CI supports
             | multiple runners for a single job, so the workflow might be
             | that you merge a merge request which modifies
             | PKGBUILD/.SRCINFO, the CI picks it up and based on
             | labels/tags dispatches it to different runners running
             | possibly on a completely different architecture for
             | building. The runners then send the artifacts back and the
             | job publishes them. The nice thing about this is that most
             | of the parts are already there handled by GitLab itself,
             | you just have to draw the rest of the owl.
        
               | Foxboron wrote:
               | This doesn't help at all as you need to coordinate so-
               | name rebuilds across multiple architectures. This implies
               | you need to some way to orchestrate a staging repository
               | and have building do rebuilds towards this repo
               | interactively until all issues are solved.
               | 
               | Retrofitting this ontop of gitlab sounds painfull. I
               | don't even know if we would like to be _that_ tied to a
               | singular forge.
        
       | orf wrote:
       | Lack of -v3 binaries are common in Docker containers. Most, if
       | not all of development, CI and deployment targets support -v3.
       | And yet images like Postgres or Redis are built with the absolute
       | lowest common denominator in mind.
       | 
       | How many CPU cycles are wasted globally because of this? It's
       | nuts
        
         | rahilarious wrote:
         | There are containers which are based on Gentoo and optimized
         | for x86-64-v2 and x86-64-v3.
         | https://github.com/rahilarious/gentoo-containers
        
           | orf wrote:
           | Sure there are, but it doesn't matter because everyone uses
           | the stock images.
           | 
           | The issue is there is no concept of a -v2 or -v3 Intel
           | architecture in the OCI spec. which is a shame.
        
       | dataflow wrote:
       | > That said, in some processor lines (i.e. Atom), support for
       | this instruction set was introduced rather late (2021).
       | 
       | Just one little sentence at the end but quoting it since it feels
       | important.
        
         | neonsunset wrote:
         | These are _bad_ processors born out of ridiculous market
         | segmentation done by Intel for which we pay for dearly (also
         | worth calling out making ECC server-only feature, because
         | profit, exabytes of user data corrupted be damned).
         | 
         | Not only they are not worth targeting, it is a moral imperative
         | not to consider them for pieces of software like PostgreSQL. If
         | the push comes to shove, a "-compat" or "-legacy" flavour of
         | binaries can be offered to select few users which use older
         | systems with CPUs made before 2011 (pre-Sandy-Bride and Jaguar
         | respectively), which would allow the overall ecosystem get
         | healthier while not leaving affected people behind.
        
           | wtallis wrote:
           | The Atom-based processors are bad not because of market
           | segmentation but because Intel is perennially unable to make
           | more than one good architecture at a time. The ones that are
           | bad because of market segmentation are the processors with a
           | Core family microarchitecture lobotomized down to the i3,
           | Pentium or Celeron product lines, leaving them years behind
           | on feature support that's physically present but fused off.
        
       | p1mrx wrote:
       | !!! The following binary packages have been ignored due to non
       | matching USE:                  =sys-libs/glibc-2.38-r10 -multilib
       | -stack-realign             =sys-libs/glibc-2.38-r10 systemd
       | 
       | So in order to use binary packages, I either need to switch to
       | systemd, or switch to no-multilib and manually enable all the
       | desktop-related USE flags. Seems too tedious to bother right now.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-02-04 23:02 UTC)