[arch-dev-public] Tracking different CPU architectures with pkgstats

[Pierre Schmitz]

I just updated the server to also accept x86_64 feature levels, ARM
and even i686. There is a new version of pkgstats (>= 3.1.0; currently
in [testing]) which is able to detect feature levels. ARM support is
pretty early, but x86_64 should be fine (using Intel's cpuid library).

If you like to check what gets detected on your system run:
    $ pkgstats submit --dump-json | head
system.architecture is your CPU and os.architecture should be the same
as "uname -m"

Let me know if this does work for you and especially if it does not.
Using Qemu for testing is quite limited and I lack old, new and AMD
CPUs.

An API and UI to analyze these data will follow in the future. (I
guess we need to wait a few weeks to see some valid results)

Greetings,

Pierre

On Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 2:40 PM Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> while reading Allan's RFC about increasing Arch's CPU requirements(*)
> I had the idea to start tracking the different x86_64 architecture
> level using pkgstats. I am sure whether to drop support for old CPUs
> is not a matter of "if" but "when"; similar as it was with i686.
> Therefore it should help to have a rough estimate about which CPUs our
> users have and how the numbers develop over time.
>
> While I am at it, I'd like to also support different ARM architectures
> provided by archlinuxarm.org (or maybe even i486/i686 by
> archlinux32.org). There is a small catch though and the reason I am
> asking for your opinion: While we will know how many users use which
> architecture, all package usage data will be aggregated regardless of
> architecture. This means for a given package we cannot tell how often
> it is used on a specific architecture compared to others. I do not
> think that this would matter for most packages though.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Pierre
>
> *) https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/blob/c5ee0eb715a01c6cd10aa5a9d3460ea46149f9ee/rfcs/0002-march.rst