Re: [PATCH 0/5] Reinstate ability to use Qemu on pre-SSE4.1 x86 hosts

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2024 at 01:51:31PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2024 at 1:38 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > This isn't anything to do with the distro installer. The use case is that
> > the distro wants all its software to be able to run on the x86_64 baseline
> > it has chosen to build with.
> 
> Sure, and they can patch the packages if their wish is not shared by
> upstream. Alternatively they can live with the fact that not all users
> will be able to use all packages, which is probably already the case.

Yep, there's almost certainly scientific packages that have done
optimizations in their builds. QEMU is slightly more special
though because it is classed as a "critical path" package for
the distro. Even the QEMU linux-user pieces are now critical path,
since they're leveraged by docker & podman for running foreign arch
containers.

> Or drop QEMU, I guess. Has FeSCO ever expressed how strict they are
> and which of the three options they'd pick?

I don't know - i'm going to raise this question to find out if
there's any guidance.

> Either way, this only affects either the QEMU maintainers for the
> distro, or the users of QEMU. It's only if the installation media used
> QEMU, that this change would be actively blocking usage of the distro
> on old processors.



With regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|