Conan Kudo, a member of the technical committee of the Fedora project, mentioned during a recent online meeting of the ELN (Enterprise Linux Next) group the desire of Microsoft to partially transition the Azure Linux distribution to the package base of Fedora Linux. For higher performance in Azure Linux, builds for the x86_64-v3 architecture are required, and Microsoft developers intended to create a fork of the Fedora package base, rebuilt for x86_64-v3.
Currently, packages in Fedora are compiled for the x86_64-v1 architecture, but there is a discussion underway about providing Fedora Linux 45 package builds for the x86_64-v3 architecture in addition to the x86_64-v1 builds. One of the three authors of this initiative is Kyle Gospodnetich, an engineer from Microsoft. This plan has not yet been approved by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which oversees the technical development of Fedora Linux. If the plan is approved, it is expected that the interests of both projects can be aligned, facilitating collaboration with Microsoft in supporting the x86_64-v3 architecture in Fedora. In 2023, Amazon transitioned its Amazon Linux distribution to the Fedora package base.
The x86-64-v* versions define an unofficial method for identifying microarchitecture state slices encompassing specific sets of extensions. The third version of the x86-64 microarchitecture (x86-64-v3) has been applied in Intel processors since around 2015 (starting with Intel Haswell) and is characterized by the presence of AVX, AVX2, BMI2, FMA, LZCNT, MOVBE, and SXSAVE extensions. The x86-64-v2 version covers the SSE3, SSE4_2, SSSE3, POPCNT, LAHF-SAHF, and CMPXCHG16B extensions, while the x86-64-v4 version includes AVX512F, AVX512BW, AVX512CD, AVX512DQ, and AVX512VL. In most cases, the performance gain when building with optimizations for the x86-64-v3 architecture is approximately 1%, but in certain situations, especially in applications performing large calculations, more noticeable performance increases can be observed.
The Azure Linux distribution provides a small standard set of core packages that serve as a universal foundation for creating container images, host environments, and services running in cloud infrastructures and on edge devices. Azure Linux is used as the base for the mini-distribution WSLg, which includes components of the graphical stack to run GUI applications on Linux in WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) environments. The system manager systemd is used for service and boot management, while the package managers RPM and DNF are provided for package management.
The Azure Linux build system allows for generating both individual RPM packages based on SPEC files and source texts, as well as monolithic system images created using the rpm-ostree toolkit, which can be updated atomically without breaking them into individual packages. Accordingly, two models for delivering updates are supported: through the updating of individual packages and through the rebuilding and updating of the entire system image. There is a repository containing around 3000 already built RPM packages, which can be used to assemble custom images based on a configuration file. The base platform includes only the most necessary components and is optimized for minimal memory and disk space consumption, as well as for fast boot times.
Source: opennet.ru
