Re: subarchitectures and RISC-V, was Re: F39 proposal: RPM 4.19 (System-Wide Change proposal)

On 4/4/23 10:28, Dan Čermák wrote: > Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net&gt; writes: > >> Yeah, it'd be back to the i386/i586/i686 days... which was a bit of a >> PITA sometimes.  But cramming multiple architectures of core libraries >> into a single RPM would be bad for disk space, image size, downloads, >> etc. >> >> But something that didn't exist in the i386/i686 days is containers - >> whether base images like for podman or full things like Flatpaks. >> Before going too deep into multi-level architectures, that should be >> taken into account. > Afaik at least container runtimes do not support really support x86_64 > subarchitectures: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/15256 The situation in the RISC-V universe is even more complicated because of all the extensions https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/risc-v/standard_extensions It'll be challenging to write and package software that is portable between all those variants---the fat binaries are just not practical due to combinatorial complexity, so it'll have to be either install-time or link-time configuration. Whatever standard scheme Fedora uses for x86 will hopefully be very useful for RiSC-V era that is apparently coming, with Linux-capable SBC boards like VisionFive ($65)  and Pine64 ($70 and $8 (!) ox64) just becoming available, and a lot of activity on the horizon.