It is also complicated in that most of the large sites using aarch64On 5 June 2018 at 12:49, Jeff Backus <jeff.backus@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 10:07 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@fedoraproject.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 03:50:34PM -0400, Jeff Backus wrote:
>> > Thanks for the data. 25k is still a pretty healthy number. :) I realize
>>
>> Yeah, absolutely. And it's likely that those mirror numbers undercount,
>> because not every system checks in daily, and then there's also NAT.
>>
>> But, my gut feeling is that about half of those are not using a current
>> release _anyway_. Honest question: do you think that 12k would still
>> count as a healthy number? I mean, it's not peanuts. But maybe it'd be
>> better served by a Fedora remix (or similar) specifically targetting
>> older and low-powered systems?
>
>
> Good question. I think it would be more productive to think in percentages
> instead of raw numbers, in this case. There are a lot of FOSS projects out
> there that would love to have 12k users. :)
>
> Certainly, I would consider 10% a healthy number when talking about portion
> of user base. I would even argue that 1% is still a healthy number,
> particularly with regard to decisions that have a reasonable chance of
> disenfranchising those affected. While I hate seeing people leave a
> community, I wouldn't be able to defend 0.1%. So, somewhere in there is my
> general boundary.
>
> Now cost changes all of that, of course. Obviously if 75% of our effort is
> going to please 10%, then 10% isn't a healthy number.
>
> Clearly effort is going into enabling Fedora to work on non-SSE2 systems by
> teams invested in the success of Fedora in general and not the success of
> non-SSE2 systems in particular. I just don't know how to quantify it.
>
> Based on Smooge's awesome numbers, it looks like x86_32 is in the 2.3%
> range. It would be interesting to see how this stacks up to AArch64 and
> other secondary arches. Unfortunately, what complicates things is how x86_32
> is so intertwined with x86_64.
>
and arm32 do so in ways which make them uncountable. They will have
'thousands' of nodes but all of them use an internal mirror so we see
them as only 1..
The other issue is that the arm/aarch64 have active upstream help from
people who are building the boards. There isn't any such support on
the x86_32 side with the manufacturers getting to the point of saying
"here is $20.00 and an ebay link.. buy at least a pentium iv or v
please. " The question that the x86 group needs to figure out is how
many of the 3800 active systems are going to not have SSE2.
> To your point re: a remix, that is an option we've discussed within the SIG
> and is one we are open to exploring. A remix wouldn't resolve issues
> introduced by enabling SSE2 by default, unless we maintained a parallel set
> of packages e.g. i586 (which I've already been warned about. :) )
>
>>
>> > that there are a lot of unknowns in the data, so it is difficult to draw
>> > any hard conclusions, but 25k is still much larger than 0. Splitting
>> > into
>> > i686 into i586 and i686 would give more insight into who still needs
>> > non-SSE2... Probably hurts my argument, though. :)
>>
>> Soooooo.... this is the kind of thing that more a detailed hardware
>> census could really help us with!
>
>
> Yes, I would agree :)
>
So it would probably be a lot more detailed than other sites are
running. I looked at the popcorn data and they seem to count whether
an OS is i386 or amd64 not if the CPU is pentium iii. Neither did any
of the other OS census programs.