Raising the equipment threshold, openSUSE Tumbleweed is transitioning to x86-64-v2 requirements

CTOnews.com, November 29, similar to the x86-64-v2 CPU support required for SUSE / openSUSE Adaptable Linux Platform, the rolling release of openSUSE Tumbleweed is now beginning to transition to x86-64-v2 microarchitecture support.

CTOnews.com has learned that openSUSE Tumbleweed's current development goal is based on x86 targets 64 (v1), but is gradually migrating to x86-64-v2. After a full transition to x86-64-v2, the CPU instruction set extension requires CMPXCHG16B, LAHF-SAHF, POPCNT, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and SSSE3.

This means raising the CPU threshold, requiring Intel Nehalem or AMD Bulldozer to update the CPU. Through the support of instruction sets such as SSE 4.2 and SSSE3, the compiler can better play the performance of the new CPU. X86-64-v2 requirements limit Tumbleweed CPU support to Intel CPU for the past 15 years or AMD hardware for the past 10 years.

This is a smart move for openSUSE / SUSE. In addition to the x86-64-v2 required by openSUSE ALP, other distributions such as RHEL9 have also put forward requirements for x86-64-v2, and even AVX has required x86-64-v3.

In openSUSE's announcement today about the x86-64-v2 transition, they did note that a community repository was being built to maintain x86-64 (v1) support for users still using systems that are not currently supported.