[CentOS-devel] Proposal: CentOS x86 SIG

Thu Mar 16 08:57:24 UTC 2023
Dan Horák <dan at danny.cz>

On Wed, 15 Mar 2023 14:46:31 -0400
Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 1:37 PM Florian Weimer <fweimer at 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:
> > >
> > > 1) 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?
> >
> > > 2) 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.

is there a place where the plans can be tracked? I am sure many HW/CPU
vendors are or would be interested in zlib-ng replacing zlib.


		Dan