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OpenSUSE to drop early 64-bit CPUs
Tumbleweed moves to x86-64-v2 – do you even know which version you have?
Tumbleweed is SUSE’s rolling release distro and is constantly updated with the latest stable software; development is handled by OpenSUSE Factory. Tumbleweed’s Dominique Leuenberger has sent an email to the Factory mailing list saying the Factory is “repurposed to move forward with x86-64-v2”. This leaves the first generation of 64-bit chips dead when implemented. A new repository will be created for legacy systems but will require volunteers to keep it running as, after setting it up, Leuenberger says he won’t touch it. SUSE Linux Enterprise is already due to move to x86-64-v2 (it had considered moving to v3, but this was dropped as a step too far). Given that Leap is derived from Tumbleweed, it can only be a matter of time before that joins the list. It makes sense – Tumbleweed is aimed at high-performance and enterprise applications and the bar has to move at some point.
Not all 64-bit chips are the same but you will be forgiven for not knowing which generation of architecture you have. In 2020, AMD, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE got together to define the difference between various implementations of the instruction set because, over the years, numerous extensions had been added, and if you wanted to access these directly, you needed to know if a chip included support. To make this “easy”, x86-64 architectures were divided into four versions, each representing a minimum level of support: x86-64-v1 is the baseline; v2 starts around 2009 and includes SSE4; v3 appeared around 2015 and includes AVX2; while v4 has AVX512, which is limited to server chips and Intel’s Core-X. Unless your system is over 10 years old, you’re probably fine. The loss of earlier versions of the Atom chips might sting – some were released as recently as 2013 and were still v1 – but otherwise Athlon 64, Pentium-D and first-gen Intel Core 2 are the main victims.