Red Hat Evaluating x86-64-v3 Requirement For RHEL 10

Not only is Canonical exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds for targeting Intel and AMD processors with AVX/AVX2 support, but Red Hat has publicly confirmed now they are exploring a possible x86-64-v3 requirement for next year's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 requires x86-64-v2 while for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 they are looking at upping things to x86-64-v3 that would basically mandate Intel and AMD processors with AVX/AVX2 support. This roughly translates to Intel Haswell era processors or AMD Excavator era CPUs and newer. Plus x86-64-v3 also mandates FMA, VEX encoding, and other goodies that can potentially help with performance when able to unconditionally target x86-64-v3.

Red Hat's Florian Weimer wrote yesterday on the Red Hat Developer Blog:

"Even if we cannot show performance improvements for software included in RHEL, it may still make sense to go ahead with the switch. The reason is that if RHEL 10 requires the x86-64-v3 baseline, ISVs will be able to rely on it, too. This reduces maintenance cost for some ISVs because they no longer need to maintain (and test) AVX and non-AVX code paths in their manually tuned software.
...
While our plan of record may change based on further findings, we are excited about the prospect that RHEL 10 will move to the x86-64-v3 baseline. You can check out your own software today by rebuilding it with -march=x86-64-v3 and testing it against the x86-64-v3 package builds from the CentOS ISA SIG."

I'll also be running my own benchmarks soon using the CentOS ISA SIG x86-64-v3 packages to see what the performance difference looks like in some of my own tests going from x86-64-v2 to x86-64-v3 in the RHEL/CentOS world.

Given the direction of Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, and others, it looks like over the next year or two most of the major enterprise Linux vendors will be focusing on x86-64-v3 and newer. This is good news in general as most Intel/AMD CPUs of the past decade support x86-64-v3 requirements but in the Atom space and other rare exceptions in more recent years there are some newer CPUs still lacking the necessary Advanced Vector Extensions support, but in any event this is good news at large for helping to better optimize performance for these more recent Intel/AMD processors.

Fedora 40 meanwhile this spring is looking at shipping optimized x86_64 binaries using HWCAPs.