Conan Kudo (Conan Kudo), a member of the Fedora project technical committee, discussed during the recent online meeting of the ELN group (Enterprise Linux Next) Microsoft’s intentions to partially base the Azure Linux distribution on Fedora Linux. This move aims to improve performance on Azure Linux by creating package builds for the x86_64-v3 architecture with a fork of the Fedora package base specifically rebuilt for this architecture.
Currently, Fedora packages are built for the x86_64-v1 architecture. The plan is to introduce 45 x86_64-v3 package builds in Fedora Linux alongside the existing x86_64-v1 builds. Kyle Gospodnetich (Kyle Gospodnetich), an engineer at Microsoft, is one of the authors of this initiative. However, the plan has yet to be approved by FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which oversees the technical development of Fedora Linux. Collaboration with Microsoft to support the x86_64-v3 architecture in Fedora could be possible if the plan is approved. Amazon previously migrated the Amazon Linux distribution to the Fedora package base in 2023.
The x86-64-v* versions classify microarchitecture states based on sets of extensions. The x86-64-v3 architecture, used in Intel processors since around 2015, includes extensions like AVX, AVX2, and FMA. Building packages with optimizations for x86-64-v3 can lead to a performance increase of approximately 1%, with larger gains in applications that perform intensive calculations.
The Azure Linux distribution offers a standard set of basic packages for creating containers, host environments, and cloud-based services. It is also the foundation of WSLg, a mini-distribution used for edge devices.