Comment 15 for bug 2059910

I too am running hardware that is 10+ years old that still runs up to date software. Similar to hhesse, I've got a CPU that supports SSE4a and SSE2, but not SSE4.1 or SSE4.2 (AMD Phenom II X6 1090T).

I hit this via my use of certbot to automate creating/renewing SSL certificates (https://discourse.linuxserver.io/t/certbot-illegal-instruction/8832), which for me is a core component of my network and functionality that I don't feel comfortable leaving unpatched. I've also got other containers that use lxml; I don't like that they are also unpatched, but less of an immediate concern.

I'd rather not set up a separate build pipeline for all the docker images I use that depend on lxml, so my options are either to upgrade hardware or for lxml to go back to supporting my CPU. Since my hardware currently meets my compute needs, I'd rather not upgrade my hardware. However, I understand that supporting 10+ year old hardware isn't necessarily at the top of the requirements list for most folks.

Selfishly I'd ask that older instruction sets be supported, but if there's good reason why the minimum required instruction set was changed, it'd help me sleep better at night.

What would make sense to me would be that lxml match the supported instruction sets of cython (https://github.com/cython/cython/blob/dbb4e6a0e36a6c190d67d6e829db9164503be5d4/pyproject.toml#L14), but I noticed that scoder is the maintainer of that as well, so maybe he's planning on changing cython's minimum dependencies as well.

Edit: I forgot to mention, a big thank you to folks like scoder who maintain these core libraries that keep compute running around the world. I know it's not easy, but know that there are people that see the work you do and appreciate your tireless efforts.