Re: isa-support -- exit strategy?
On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 2:36 AM M. Zhou <lumin@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Indeed supporting number crunching programs on ancient
> hardware is not meaningful, but the demand on Debian's
> support for number crunching is not that strong according
> to my years of observation.
>
> For popular applications that can take advantage of above-baseline
> instruction sets, they will eventually write the dynamic code
> dispatcher and add the fallback.
>
> For applications seriously need performance, they will
> leave CPU and go to GPU or other hardware. If the user correctly
> write the code and fully leverage GPU, the non-optimal CPU
> code won't necessarily be a bottleneck.
>
> For applications seriously need CPU performance, they are
> possibly going to tell the users how to tweak compiling
> parameters and how to compile locally.
I have to disagree on this one. Yes, runtime detection and GPU
acceleration is great and all, but not every scientific library does
it and I think it's unrealistic for us to patch them all up.
Also I don't like the point "since there is low demand for number
crunching on Debian, so let's just continue to ignore this problem".
At least I know a decent amount of people that use Debian (or
downstream distros) for scientific number crunching. Compiling
optimized for large workloads will always be a thing no matter the
baseline, but when getting started distro packages are just one less
thing to care about.
On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 7:25 AM Andrey Rahmatullin <wrar@debian.org> wrote:
>
> A partial arch (whatever that is, yeah) with the x86-64-v3 baseline, and
> optionally raise the main amd64 baseline to x86-64-v2?
+1
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