Platform Support: Updates

We wanted to take a moment to announce some changes on officially supported platforms. Officially supported platforms are those targets for which we run the test suite regularly, run regular on-demand stress tests and build and ship binaries for. When bugs linked to officially supported platforms are reported, we prioritize them over other platforms.

New official platforms

We’re extremely happy to announce official support for two new platforms:

• Linux ARM64: ARM64-based Linux hosts are now fully supported and have been given Tier-1 status
• macOS ARM64: ARM64-based macOS hosts (such as M1, M2, M3) are now fully supported and have been given Tier-1X status. The X indicates that some toolchain limitations prevent providing full Tier-1 support, but the entire test suite along with stress tests are run, guaranteeing compatibility.

We’re currently using self-hosted runners (running on our own infrastructure) for Linux ARM64 builds until GitHub opens up ARM64 runners for our organization. All future releases from this point onwards will include compiled binaries for both these targets.

Doubling down on 64-bit targets

We’re focusing exclusively on improving support for new and existing 64-bit targets. The primary reason why we’re doing so is simply because of the fact that the majority of our deployments are going to be on cloud providers all of which exclusively support 64-bit hardware and software. The prevalence of 64-bit is so profound that even embedded and small computers like the Raspberry Pi support 64-bit operating systems (some people from our community self-host Skytable for hobby applications on their Raspberry Pi computers).

In the same direction, the limitations on 32-bit systems are immense especially the address space (that supports up to 4GB). For a primarily in-memory and large-scale data oriented database like Skytable, 4GB of RAM is very limiting (while it can be increased with PAE there are performance penalties and compatibility issues).

Owing to all of this, we plan to initially downgrade all 32-bit platforms to Tier-2 support and eventually completely stop supporting 32-bit platforms. Due to the amount of low-level code that we use, simultaneously maintaining 32-bit and 64-bit targets in the same codebase has become extremely time consuming and error prone. Expect no support for 32-bit targets post the 0.8 release track.

Conclusion

With this recent update on platform support, Skytable now supports the vast majority of 64-bit targets and we will direct all efforts to promoting all 64-bit targets to full Tier-1 support. That’ll be all for this announcement. We’ll see you at the next release!