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

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.

Comments

Re:Different compiler

[Bert64]

Not everything can be compiled with Intel's compiler...
I believe Gentoo has offered an option to build with Intel's compiler for a while, but not all packages will work that way.

Re:Different compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

And what it look like when running an AMD core?

some clarification

[nimbius]

Clear Linux ships in an optimized form for delivering best performance on INTEL x86 hardware with enabling many INTEL compiler optimizations by default

For major corporate environments, this means nothing as youve likely been married to Intel hardware for quite some time. For startups, most of these features are pointless:
Autoproxy: is compensating for departmental overhead and the bloat of a monolithic organizational structure that prevents network operations or system administrators from coherently deploying a server outside the corporate proxy.
Function Multiversioning (FMV): is intels solution for the -march=native compiler flag. Want your code to scream on haswell and crawl on bulldozer? Intel sure does, and what better way to ensure that then fucking with the compiler again.
Telemetry: something something agile...something something quality...we rewrote the linux Backtrace so in 15 years after we lose interest in clear linux, your code is still hobbled to us.
clear containers: take something an open source team worked almost a decade on and slap you brand on it. viola.
stateless: half a dozen devops tools already take care of imaging, reimaging, config management, and the rest. but lets have an Intel proprietary solution too. after all, Openstack is no fun unless youre vendor dependent all over again.
debug: did we mention we fucked with the compiler again? it was awesome when we did it to kill AMD64, and now its awesome again when we're trying to kill openstacks vendor-independent features.

Better solution for a Linux that exploits the CPU

[Eravnrekaree]

Its nice to see this however we really should, in general, have a better way for Linux programs to be able to easily take advantage of the CPU extensions available without recompile. There are dozens of permutations of CPU extensions, so distributing a binary for each permutation is not feasible. Full from source compilation takes too long for many users. Having Linux binaries being able to use the CPUs most advanced features has been a problem. One solution that I favor is to take a page from AS/400, in a variation of that, in each library file, put a copy of the machine code, but also a copy of the abstract syntax tree, the last compilation phase. If the binary is moved to a new CPU, the AST is run through the code generator to regenerate the machine code in the file according to the options the CPU supports. All done in situ. This is much better than storing a copy a binary for each CPU permutation in a library file. It makes things easy to use and is faster than compiling from source as the lexer and parser phase does not need to be repeated.

Stock kernel, no way.

[BrookHarty]

No matter what distro I use for my desktop, I always use the latest pf-kernel, with bfq scheduler, low latency, cpu optimizations, etc. I can overload the desktop, and music/video is smooth as silk, and compiling is faster. Its a real world performance boost.

I'd love to see how a pf-kernel does vs stock on each distro.

Re:Does it use

[KermodeBear]

There's one thing about systemd that I don't understand: If it is terrible (and I have no doubt that it is, from its philosophy to its implementation), why have almost all of the major Linux distributions moved to it?

Re:Different compiler

[LWATCDR]

1 That is an opinion.
2. It is opt in. You opt in when you download and install ClearLinux.
3. They make it very transparent how it works and what it does.
4. ClearLinux is not some mainstream Linux for the average joe. Read the docs folks.