News Summary:
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When the patterns-glibc-hwcaps-x86_64_v3 package is installed on supported systems, packages with the “x86-64-v3” suffix are automatically installed when available. The x86-64-v3 packages use Glibc’s HWCAPS feature.
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The openSUSE Tumbleweed mobile edition has recently started rolling out optional x86-64-v3 optimized packages for users around Intel Haswell or newer systems and wants to get the most out of the performance. their hardware. The selection of x86-64-v3 packages built by openSUSE Tumbleweed is currently quite limited, but it is hoped that this large Linux distribution joining the HWCAPS group will lead other Linux distributions to follow suit.
However, for now, the x86-64-v3 package coverage is quite limited with optimized versions of the JPEG-XL library, the libpng library, libxml2, and later Python 3.11. The Python 3.11-optimized x86-64-v3 version is arguably the most exciting of what openSUSE Tumbleweed currently offers for this HWCAPS implementation. But now that this openSUSE Tumblewed framework is established around HWCAPS x86-64-v3, expect the field to start to thrive with packages more optimized for performance sensitive software…
Kudos to openSUSE/SUSE for kickstarting this shipment of HWCAPS x86-64-v3 and I hope more optimized packages will be available soon to provide a better and more capable out-of-the-box experience on this version. this Linux distribution. Ideally, the fact that this major Linux distribution now uses Glibc HWCAPS would encourage more Linux distributions to pursue the same approach to maximize the x86_64 performance of their shipped packages.
Since this uses the HWCAPS feature, hopefully in the near future openSUSE will also look at x86-64-v4 packages for some packages on compatible hardware. With x86-64-v4 comes AVX-512 and this can be especially beneficial for some HPCs and scientific software among other cases that we have shown over time when parsing JSON is even faster. Now that AMD Zen 4 has AVX-512 across their lineup, that’s even more exciting and will hopefully lead to viable x86-64-v4 HWCAPS packages in the not-too-distant future. The downsides are associated with additional QA, the time spent deciding what’s worth optimizing, and then the obvious increase in hosting requirements that reflect the hosting plan.
