Werk #19914: Checkmk now requires an x86-64-v2 capable CPU
| Component | Linux distributions | ||
| Title | Checkmk now requires an x86-64-v2 capable CPU | ||
| Date | Jul 3, 2026 | ||
| Level | Prominent Change | ||
| Class | New Feature | ||
| Compatibility | Incompatible - Manual interaction might be required | ||
| Checkmk versions & editions |
|
As of Checkmk 3.0, running Checkmk requires an x86-64 CPU supporting the x86-64-v2 microarchitecture level. This corresponds to Intel processors of the Nehalem generation (2008) or newer.
On older CPUs, Checkmk components that use the bundled numpy library crash with an error like:
RuntimeError: NumPy was built with baseline optimizations:
(X86_V2) but your machine doesn't support:
(X86_V2).
Depending on the edition, this can already happen during the site update, when
cmk-update-config fails with the above error.
Note that virtual machines can be affected even on recent hardware if the
hypervisor exposes an older virtual CPU model (for example QEMU's default
qemu64). You can verify support on a host by checking for the sse4_2 flag in
/proc/cpuinfo, or with /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --help | grep x86-64-v2
on distributions with glibc 2.33 or newer.
Why this change
The numpy library shipped with Checkmk raised its default baseline CPU optimizations to x86-64-v2 in version 2.4, and SIMD support for older processors is no longer maintained upstream (see the numpy 2.4.0 release notes).
If you are running Checkmk on hardware or virtual CPUs older than this, you need to migrate your site to a machine with a more recent CPU before updating.