Ahead of the imminent launch of openSUSE/SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), the community is evaluating whether to increase the feature level of the x86_64 microarchitecture required by the Linux operating system, and what options are available to take advantage of the newer x86_64 instruction set extensions without forcing the Tight CPU requirements and removal of legacy hardware support.
Developed by SUSE in conjunction with the openSUSE community, the "Adaptable Linux Platform" (ALP) will eventually be the successor to SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 -- and will see "fundamental changes" in technology and design as the next-generation enterprise-grade SUSE operating system.
The community has been discussing raising the x86_64 CPU requirements for ALP and reaching the x86-64-v3 feature level that may require AVX-enabled CPUs. And a recent issue tracker shows that an ALP proof-of-concept coming in September/October 2022 will enable x86_64-v3.
SUSE Director Lubos Kocman, who is responsible for the release, commented that the target of SUSE ALP may be x86_64-v3 , but the target of openSUSE may only be x86_64-v2 in the end.
According to mailing list discussions , community members have also raised concerns about the current issues with the x86_64 microarchitecture feature levels, namely that they are a rather arbitrary collection that currently doesn't integrate well into scenarios such as package management solutions . This will change the way upstream reprocessing architecture is handled, but there is no tentative code or solid advice yet.
As far as the ALP requirements increase, it does appear that the proof of concept for SUSE ALP coming out later this year will target x86_64-v3, while for openSUSE, whether they target v2 or v3 seems to be undecided. This is in line with the extensive discussion of other Linux distributions (re)evaluating their x86_64 baselines, hopefully leading to more upstream processing improvements in package managers etc.