Opinions on packaging ATLAS (for the x86 architecture)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Oct 07, 2009 at 06:40:38PM +0200, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> On Wed, 7 Oct 2009 11:29:11 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote
> 
> > Surely the way to do this is to know what your workload is doing,
> > and not do live migration to random hardware? 
> 
> Redetection of CPU features in a live system is complete madness.
> The virt-infrastructure has to make sure that the system migrated to
> has a superset of features of the machine migrated from.

Difficult, surely.  Madness, possibly.

I really meant from this thread that these are a list of things that
Linux distros should keep in mind.

If it's possible to build distro packages so that detection happens at
boot time, instead of installing hardware-specific packages, then
please try to use the boot-time method.

If it's possible to detect hardware availability when a program starts
up, rather than hard-coding it into the binary, please use that
method.

If it's possible to write programs and shared library loaders so that
redetection can be performed mid-execution, then prefer that method
over one which only detects hardware when the program starts up.

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/what-things-make-p2vv2v-conversion-hard/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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