HN Reader

243

145

Announce was here: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/introducing-architecture-vari...

and key point: "Previous benchmarks we have run (where we rebuilt the entire archive for x86-64-v3 57) show that most packages show a slight (around 1%) performance improvement and some packages, mostly those that are somewhat numerical in nature, improve more than that."

3 months agoby mobilio

A reference for x86-64 microarchitecture levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...

x86-64-v3 is AVX2-capable CPUs.

3 months agoby theandrewbailey

What are the changes to dpkg and apt? Are they being shared with Debian? Could this be used to address the pesky armel vs. armel+hardfloat vs. armhf issue, or for that matter, the issue of i486 vs. i586 vs. i686 vs. the many varieties of MMX and SSE extensions for 32-bit?

(There is some older text in the Debian Wiki https://wiki.debian.org/ArchitectureVariants but it's not clear if it's directly related to this effort)

3 months agoby zozbot234

Over the past year, Intel has pulled back from Linux development.

Intel has reduced its number of employees, and has lost lots of software developers.

So we lost Clear Linux, their Linux distribution that often showcased performance improvements due to careful optimization and utilization of microarchitectural enhancements.

I believe you can still use the Intel compiler, icc, and maybe see some improvements in performance-sensitive code.

https://clearlinux.org/

"It was actively developed from 2/6/2015-7/18/2025."

3 months agoby watersb

Getting a 1% across the board general purpose improvement might sound small, but is quite significant. Happy to see Canonical invest more heavily in performance and correctness.

Would love to see which packages benefited the most in terms of percentile gain and install base. You could probably back out a kWh/tons of CO2 saved metric from it.

3 months agoby Hasz

> you will not be able to transfer your hard-drive/SSD to an older machine that does not support x86-64-v3. Usually, we try to ensure that moving drives between systems like this would work. For 26.04 LTS, we’ll be working on making this experience cleaner, and hopefully provide a method of recovering a system that is in this state.

Does anyone know what the plans are to accomplish this?

3 months agoby dfc

There's an unofficial repo for ArchLinux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unofficial_user_repositorie...

> Description: official repositories compiled with LTO, -march=x86-64-vN and -O3.

Packages: https://status.alhp.dev/

3 months agoby benatkin

A reference for x86-64 microarchitecture levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...

x86-64-v3 is AVX2-capable CPUs.

3 months agoby theandrewbailey

I'm really "new" to x64 (I only migrated from 32-bit in 2020...) and the difference I noticed between x86-64-v1 and x86-64-v3 was only with video (with ffmpeg), audio (mp3/ogg/mp4...) and encryption; the rest remains practically the same.

Naively, I believe it might be more appropriate to have x86-64-v1 and x86-64-vN options only for specific software and leave the rest as x86-64-v1.

AVX seemed to give the biggest boost to things.

Regarding those who are making fun of Gentoo users, it really did make a bigger difference in the past, but with the refinement of compilers, the difference has diminished. Today, for me, who still uses Gentoo/CRUX for some specific tasks, what matters is the flexibility to enable or disable what I want in the software, and not so much the extra speed anymore.

As an example, currently I use -Os (x86-64-v1) for everything, and only for things related to video/sound/cryptography (I believe for things related to mathematics in general?) I use -O2 (x86-64-v3) with other flags to get a little more out of it.

Interestingly, in many cases -Os with -mtune=nocona generates faster binaries even though I'm only using hardware from Haswell to today's hardware (who can understand the reason for this?).

3 months agoby random29ah

This is quite good news but it’s worth remembering that it’s a rare piece of software in the modern scientific/numerical world that can be compiled against the versions in distro package managers, as versions can significantly lag upstream months after release.

If you’re doing that sort of work, you also shouldn’t use pre-compiled PyPi packages for the same reason - you leave a ton of performance on the table by not targeting the micro-architecture you’re running on.

3 months agoby physicsguy

This sure feels like overkill that leaks massive complexity into a lot more areas than it’s needed in. For the applications that truly need sub-architecture variants, surely different packages or just some sort of meta package indirection would be better for everyone involved.

3 months agoby skywhopper

So if it got it right, This is mostly a way to have branches within a specific release for various levels of CPUs and their support of SIMD and other modern opcodes.

And if I have it right, The main advantage should come with package manager and open sourced software where the compiled binaries would be branched to benefit and optimize newer CPU features.

Still, this would be most noticeable mostly for apps that benefit from those features such as audio dsp as an example or as mentioned ssl and crypto.

3 months agoby rock_artist

Many other 3rd party software has already required x86-64-v2 or -v3 already.

I couldn't run something from NPM on a older NAS machine (HP Microserver Gen 7) recently because of this.

3 months agoby zdw

Seems like this is not using glibc's hwcaps (where shared libraries were located in microarch specific subdirs).

To me hwcaps feels like a very unfortunate feature creep of glibc now. I don't see why it was ever added, given that it's hard to compile only shared libraries for a specific microarch, and it does not benefit executables. Distros seem to avoid it. All it does is causing unnecessary stat calls when running an executable.

3 months agoby stabbles

I presume the motivation is performance optimization? It would be more compelling to include some of the benefits in the announcement?

3 months agoby smlacy

"Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39255458

"Changes/Optimized Binaries for the AMD64 Architecture v2" (2025) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Optimized_Binaries_fo... :

> Note that other distributions use higher microarchitecture levels. For example RHEL 9 uses x86-64-v2 as the baseline, RHEL 10 uses x86-64-v3, and other distros provide optimized variants (OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Ubuntu).

3 months agoby westurner

Nice. This is one of the main reasons why I picked CachyOS recently. Now I can fallback to Ubuntu if CachyOS gets me stuck somewhere.

3 months agoby sluongng

I clicked on this article expecting an M series variant for Apple hardware...

3 months agoby ElijahLynn

There was a fat elf project to solve this problem at one point I thought.

3 months agoby zer0zzz

> means to better exploit modern processors without compromising support for older hardware

very odd choice of words. "better utilize/leverage" is perhaps the right thing to say here.

3 months agoby whalesalad

This is awesome, but ... If you process requires deterministic results (speaking about floats/doubles mostly here), then you need to get this straight.

3 months agoby malkia