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> too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible Sorry I haven't actually read the original article so this is a bit of a driveby. But, I'm skept
by bjackman 1mo ago
> too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible
Sorry I haven't actually read the original article so this is a bit of a driveby.
But, I'm skeptical of this? Surely whichever cloud platform first offers RISC-V compute, the next cloud platforms will ship a CPU that's compatible. Probably they'll be RFTing the same CPU vendors and they won't need to coordinate explicitly for this to happen. Then everyone else building RISC-V servers will essentially be forced to align on the "AWS variant" or whatever.
So yes you'll need a -cloud build of the distro you use but most people are already doing that and the cloud platforms are already providing the infra for distros to ship it (I assume they are also contributing to the -cloud distro builds directly).
RISC-V laptops and phones I could see this being an issue but for server compute it feels like there's gonna be a Schelling point.
(Actually, for phones can't Google just fix this by fiat?)
- SuchAnonMuchWow 1mo agoI'm not completely sure, but are cloud versions of the distros actually recompiling the packages ? I though it was mostly: "select a minimal set of packages needed for docker and co", not "recompile all the packages you want in your distro".
- bjackman 1mo agoDon't know actually, it might be I they are just putting cloud-init in, installing their VM agents, and maybe like tweaking the bootloader setup and kernel cmdline or something. But equally, they might be compiling it themselves so they don't have to trust distros' build farms so much. But anyway I don't think it matters. The hard part here is having a distro image supply chain, not compiling stuff. If they do need to start compiling loads of stuff they didn't before... They just need to add CPUs.