AL2023 system requirements
This section describes the system requirements for using AL2023.
CPU requirements for running AL2023
To run any AL2023 code, the processor used needs to meet certain minimum requirements. Attempts to run AL2023 on CPUs that do not meet these requirements might result in illegal instruction errors very early in code execution.
The minimum requirements apply to AL2023 on Amazon EC2, AL2023 in containers, and AL2023 outside Amazon EC2.
ARM CPU Requirements for AL2023
All AL2023 aarch64 (ARM) binaries are
built for 64-bit. No 32-bit ARM binaries are
available, so a 64-bit ARM CPU is required.
Note
For Arm-based instances, AL2023 only supports instance types that use Graviton2 or later processors. AL2023 doesn't support A1 instances.
AL2023 requires an ARMv8.2 compliant processor with the Cryptography
Extension (ARMv8.2+crypto).
All AL2023 packages for aarch64 are built with the
-march=armv8.2-a+crypto compiler flag. Although we attempt
to print graceful error messages when AL2023 code is
attempted to be run on older ARM processors, it is
possible that the first error message may be an illegal instruction
error.
Note
Because of the AL2023 aarch64 base CPU requirements,
all Raspberry Pi systems prior to the Raspberry Pi 5 do not meet the
minimum CPU requirements.
x86-64 CPU Requirements for AL2023
All AL2023 x86-64 binaries are built for the
x86-64v2 revision of the x86-64 architecture
by passing -march=x86-64-v2 to the compiler.
The x86-64v2 revision of the architecture adds the
following CPU features on top of the baseline x86-64 architecture:
-
CMPXCHG16B -
LAHF-SAHF -
POPCNT -
SSE3 -
SSE4_1 -
SSE4_2 -
SSSE3
This roughly maps to x86-64 processors released in 2009 or later. Examples include the Intel Nehalem, AMD Jaguar, Atom Silvermont,
along with the VIA Nano and Eden C microarchitectures.
In Amazon EC2, all x86-64 instance types support x86-64v2,
including M1, C1, and M2 instance families.
No 32-bit x86 (i686) AL2023 binaries are built. Although AL2023 retains support for running 32-bit userspace binaries, this functionality is deprecated and might be removed in a future major version of Amazon Linux. For more information, see 32bit x86 (i686) Packages.
Memory (RAM) requirements for running AL2023
The Amazon EC2 .nano family of instance types
(t2.nano, t3.nano, t3a.nano,
and t4g.nano) have 512 MB RAM which is the minimum
requirement for AL2023.
Note
Although 512 MB is the miminum requirement, these instance types are memory constrained and functionality and performance may be limited.
AL2023 images have not been tested on systems with less than 512 MB RAM. Running AL2023 based container images in less than 512 MB RAM will be dependent on the containerized workload.
Some workloads, such as dnf update between some AL2023
releases can require more than 512 MB RAM. For this reason, the
AL2023.3
release introduced enabling zram by default for instances
with less than 800 MB of RAM. For containerized workloads, this means
that some workloads might run fine on AL2023 instances with this amount
of memory, but fail when run in a container restricted to this amount of
memory usage.
For instance types with less than 800 MB of RAM, AL2023 (as of
AL2023.3
or newer) will enable zram based swap by default. Examples
of Amazon EC2 instance types with less than 800 MB memory include
t4g.nano, t3a.nano, t3.nano,
t2.nano, and t1.micro. This means fewer out of
memory scenarios for these instance types, because AL2023 will on-demand
compress and decompress memory pages. This enables workloads that would otherwise
require an instance type with more memory, at the expense of CPU usage
needed to do the compression.