I feel that you underestimate the impact of the GPU driver issue
If the GPU driver doesn't work, people can't even log in and get started
I still do not understand why no one from the talos/ppc64le community is following up on
that amdgpu regression[1] that was introduced with the 5.9 kernel. Surely the time and
effort already taken recompiling kernels with 4k pages along with formulating and
discussing this proposal for Fedora 35 has eclipsed spending part of an evening bisecting
and replying to the amd developers? I have replied to the bug report to give some guidance
on how to bisect kernel bugs as the reporter was not familiar with git. Hopefully some
progress will be made in the coming days.
If the GPU vendors don't test their code on ppc64le (and aarch64)
then
those platforms will always lag behind x86. Users will experience
issues that have been fixed in the development phase for x86.
Are there really pervasive issues with amdgpu and non-4k page sizes? If so, they are not
being reported as there is only one bug open that mentions 64k pages in their bug tracker.
I do not see sufficient evidence to suggest that it is not worthwhile to engage with
upstream to fix real bugs. Being active participants with the upstream developers is a
very good way to motivate them to care more about smaller platforms, and likewise not
interacting with upstream is unfortunately a good way to decrease the mindshare of smaller
desktop platforms.
Personally, I'm not opposed to the 64k page size in principle:
my
concerns are about the practical issues.
If both 4k and 64k can be supported, if users can choose between
installers for either page size, then the severity of the issue is reduced
Regards,
Daniel
[1]
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1446