x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell at gmail.com
Mon Sep 27 20:30:15 UTC 2010


On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> FWIW, we have two measurements of x86_64 vs i686.
>
> Smolt:
>        65% i686
>        35% x86_64
>
> mirrors.fedoraproject.org:
>        70% i686
>        30% x86_64


Right— it's clear that i686 is far more commonly installed today but a
non-trivial part of that must be due to the fact that the x86_64 links
are hidden.  The smolt cpu stats (mhz, number of cores, vendors)
suggests that a significant portion of these i686 installs are x86_64
hardware.  Though I don't know of any way to gage this precisely.
Does anything smolt gathers reliably indicate if the system is x86_64
capable? If so, could that data be made public?

I would expect that the i686 install will remain the most common so
long as that is what the Fedora project promotes.

Drawing attention back to the original post for a moment "When will
the Fedora project begin recommending x86_64"— I wasn't rattling so
much for the change to happen now (although I think it should), as
much ask asking when it will happen, or really what criteria will be
used to determine if we've reached that point yet.

I don't think criteria which can never be true (number of systems that
can run x86_64 > can run i686) or which are nearly circular (existing
installed versions; which no-doubt depends strongly on what Fedora
chooses to promote) are all that reasonable.



Cheers—


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