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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.
Intel's own compiler in many cases generated code that runs 15%-20% faster than code compiled under GCC.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Clear Linux is a rolling-release-inspired distribution that issues new versions a few times a day and is up to version 5700.
Big deal. Firefox will catch up with that shortly.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.