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Intel's Clear Linux Distribution Offers Fast Out-Of-The-Box Performance (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on from the new-to-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes: In a 10-way Linux distribution battle including OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, one of the fastest out-of-the-box performers was a surprising contender: Intel's Clear Linux Project that's still in its infancy. Clear Linux ships in an optimized form for delivering best performance on x86 hardware with enabling many compiler optimizations by default, highly-tuned software bundles, function multi-versioning for the most performant code functions based upon CPU, AutoFDO for automated feedback-direct optimizations and other performance-driven features. Clear Linux is a rolling-release-inspired distribution that issues new versions a few times a day and is up to version 5700.

3 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Kind of a silly summary; by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The rankings in individual benchmarks were all over the place; a composite of those benchmarks is only valid for some theoretical "average" workload that's the average of all the workloads each individual benchmark is supposed to represent; almost nobody is bound to have a workload that resembles that "average".

    In fact the whole "shooutout" scenario is silly because Clear Linux is a container-centric distro. It makes no sense at all to compare it to general purpose distros like Ubuntu and plain vanilla Centos then leave out Red Hat/Centos's Atomic Host flavors.

    In any case if performance is your paramount concern, then "out-of-the-box" performance is bound to be irrelevant to you because you'll be compiling from source with your own choice of compiler and flags, as well as fiddling with all those bells and whistles exposed in the /sys interface. What's interesting would be an exploration of why various distros did better or worse on individual benchmarks.

    --
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  2. Re:Different compiler by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A few years back, GCC took out all the processor-specific optimizations and put in only general purpose optimizations

    WTF are you talking about? That is patently false.

  3. Re:Different compiler by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Clear Linux also comes packaged with spyware

    From the 1st paragraph at that link:

    The end users may disable the telemetry component of Clear Linux OS for Intel Architecture or even redirect where records go if they wish to collect for themselves.

    Not the point. Telemetry collection should be opt-in, not opt-out.