Document supported hardware architectures

[zamazan4ik]

Hi!

I have checked the documentation but did not find any word about supported architectures - only about supported operating systems.

Could you please put the information about supported architectures to the documentation please? E.e. about supported architectures for different operating systems, some specific requirements to the supported instructions, if you have any (e.g. maybe AVX is required - I do not know).

This kind of information is important for the end-users.

Thanks in advance!

[martinsumner]

Most of the code is vanilla Erlang/OTP - but we also have things like basho leveldb as a dependency, and this constrains what we can build for. The list of pre-produced packages is a guide to what basic platforms Riak will successfully build on at the moment.

There is nothing within the code, to the best of my knowledge to exploit any particular instruction sets, unless it exists as optimisations within OTP.

We don't as part of our release process run tests on "non-standard" hardware either. Recently we've had some potential issues where we could run make and run Riak on Raspberry Pis but a specific feature mysteriously didn't work (this is still under investigation). So the existence of a package for a given OS, unfortunately isn't a guarantee everything works.

We do though intend to do some specific work to ensure future releases compile/run on Graviton AWS instances. However, right now, most users who are accepting updates are running on modern Intel-based servers with relatively up-to-date RedHat/Ubuntu. This is what we're focused on supporting within the community, and you might not get help on platforms beyond that. Most of our pre-release testing is currently done on OSX or Ubuntu (on Intel CPUs).

There are commercial Riak support organisations (such as TI Tokyo, that produce the packages) that might specifically work with you if you wanted to Riak to run on a specific architecture. The tests are open source - so you have the opportunity to self-assure Riak on other architectures.

I'm sorry there isn't a clearer answer to your question.

[zamazan4ik]

This is a great answer - thank you! I just suggest you put this information into the documention and for future users will be no need to ask this question again. They will be able just read the documentaton.