On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 1:37 PM Florian Weimer fweimer@redhat.com wrote:
- Josh Boyer:
We discussed this at the CentOS Board meeting last week and generally agreed with the overall idea of the SIG. There were two main questions that came up:
- What is the contribution model the SIG is envisioning? How will
people be able to participate in the SIG?
Could you add this to the proposal?
I don't have a live document for the proposal right now.
The general CentOS collaboration mechanism is a bit unclear to me, to be honest. It doesn't seem to be like Fedora, where anyone can create an account and try to get a package into the distribution. Not that this is something I expect as part of this effort; the focus should be on building existing stuff in new and exciting ways.
Anyway, here are some concrete items for collaboration:
I hope that performance experts will be able to share benchmarking results based on the optimized builds the SIG produces, and investigate glitches we encounter. Any kind of testing will help.
Some packages will fail to build with -march=x86-64-v3. Triaging these failures, reporting them upstream etc., will be required, and that part does not require any special privileges (as long as the build logs and buildroots are public, which I expect them to be).
We would benefit from expert guidance on GCC parameter defaults, like preferred vector sizes for certain operations.
Once we explore delivery mechanisms, exploring how builds can be consumed by end users in custom CI systems etc., and feedback on that will be helpful.
Do you think this provides some clarification?
- There are existing Intel people working in the Hyperscaler SIG on
some optimized libraries. How would the Hyperscaler SIG coordinate with the X86 SIG in this regard? There is a desire to share work and not duplicate effort.
Is it more than just zlib?
https://cbs.centos.org/koji/packages?tagID=2620
zlib upstream doesn't take architecture optimization patches, and maintaining the downstream patches (some of them are in CentOS proper already) is an ongoing hassle.
zlib-ng does, and the guy working on the zlib package in Hyperscale is interested in proposing switching Fedora's zlib implementation to zlib-ng partly for that reason. Another alternative is using zstd as a zlib replacement, which we're also considering for a proposal to Fedora.
I've looked at
https://sigs.centos.org/hyperscale/content/repositories/main/
That seems to be focus on CentoS 8 Stream. The package versions in 9 are actually higher than what's mentioned there.
We definitely have stuff in CentOS Stream 9, that page needs to be updated to reflect that it's in CentOS Stream 9 too. But a lot of the backport work has been pushed into CentOS Stream 9 itself rather than forking packages, in large part to the less awful contribution process.
We just released a bunch of updated content for CentOS Stream 9 in the past couple of weeks even.
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