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Clear Linux Beats CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in (Enterprise) Benchmark Tests (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Recently completed Linux distro benchmarks by Phoronix show Intel's Clear Linux is the most powerful on x86 hardware. A six-way, enterprise-focused Linux distro comparison show Clear Linux being the fastest with a Core i9 and Xeon systems, easily beating CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in a majority of the tests.
When doing an 11-way Linux distro boot test they also found Clear Linux easily booted the fastest followed by the Clear-inspired Solus distribution. Clear Linux does work on AMD hardware and works on Intel CPUs back to Sandy Bridge but leverages its speed from optimized compiler settings, specially built libraries capable of AVX instructions on supported systems, a specially tuned kernel configuration, and other optimizations/patches.
Debian 9.2 and Fedora 27 "ended up being dropped from this article due to data overload," the article concludes, "and those distributions really not offering anything really different in terms of the performance."
When doing an 11-way Linux distro boot test they also found Clear Linux easily booted the fastest followed by the Clear-inspired Solus distribution. Clear Linux does work on AMD hardware and works on Intel CPUs back to Sandy Bridge but leverages its speed from optimized compiler settings, specially built libraries capable of AVX instructions on supported systems, a specially tuned kernel configuration, and other optimizations/patches.
Debian 9.2 and Fedora 27 "ended up being dropped from this article due to data overload," the article concludes, "and those distributions really not offering anything really different in terms of the performance."
Windows vs. NetBSD! Who will be penetrated more? Heeyyyzzzoooo!
b/c it's a clone of RHEL, and RHEL sticks to older, "very long term support" kernels to minimize risks in production servers.
Linux distro produced by Intel, tuned by Intel for latest Intel hardware, works fastest of any distro on latest Intel hardware. Shocking!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
A hardware company that optimises software to run on its chipsets. No voodoo here. Whilst I dislike Intel for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the recent Minix debacle, this is nothing to ponder over.
I'll stick with FreeBSD and Red Hat/CentOS.
Is the kernel different? Libraries?
Just a different compiler, or compiler options?
This is such a stupid article.
You have to connect to their cloud to use their distro? If so, no thanks.
Boots faster ... ok, how often do we reboot linux ? :-)
is faster at cherry-picked benchmarks than its full-sized parent. how much did this ad cost?
thanks to intel's hidden cpu
Who the fuck cares about a) a benchmark discussing âoeenterpriseâ and consumer CPUs and b) any enterprise discussion about performance these days? Enterprise (compute) hardware is so over overpowered these days, adding performance to an application these days involve adding virtual CPUs to a VM.
Good on Intel for doing this. Theses are some serious improvements. There are two major implications to be drawn from these results 1) other distros can and will take notice, 2) AMD and ARM should take notice. Let the performance war begin, it will benefit everyone.
sounds to me someone doesn't know what the meaning of the word enterprise is if the highlighted comparison in the summary is it "booted fastest"
The car analogy would be a fast motorcycle versus mainstream, general purpose sedans. Yes, Clear Linux is faster. I could possibly make a Linux distro which is faster than RHEL, and other mainstream distros as well, especially if I tossed the initial RAMdisk image, and booted to some sort of init at once.
I appreciate Intel making Clear Linux available, and for IoT devices, a fast boot time is a must... but other than Clear Containers, I'd like to see more security features. IoT is where a focus in security should be, and Intel should have enough security stuff available and trivial to use.
Just load a memory snapshot that has finished booting from permanent memory, and do the few leftover hardware initializations, and off you go.
Not that anyone with a sane mind would ever run any of his stuff on a system that isn’t under his physical control. Let alone under Amazon's!
But hey, insanity is the second name of Sillycunt Valley.
Number ONE priority for an Enterprise system!
> but leverages its speed from optimized compiler settings, specially
> built libraries capable of AVX instructions on supported systems,
> a specially tuned kernel configuration, and other optimizations/patches.
I see your "Clear Linux" and raise you Gentoo with
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -fopenmp -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}
and also appropriate CPU_FLAGS_X86 for the CPU, as well as the same kernel tuning used for Clear Linux. I dare Phoronix to try that. It should be a much closer horse race.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
You assume newer is always faster. That's not necessarily so. Internet Explorer got slower and slower with each version. Vista was slower than XP. In the Linux world, going from 32-bit to 64-bit makes it slower, all other things being equal. It's entirely *possible* than a newer systemd will slow things down as it gets bigger and bigger - compare an old, small editor such as vi/vim vs the newest MS Word. Newer and bigger sure can be slower.
On the other hand, as someone else commented:
> Linux distro produced by Intel, tuned by Intel for latest Intel hardware, works fastest of any distro on latest Intel hardware.
"The number of applications that work out of the box"
Without fiddling around and googling stack overflow
This is especially a pain whenever you try to get the newest version of something.
Strange that the two benchmarks mentioned are "enterprise performance" and "boot speed". If you care about the former you probably don't care about the latter, and vice versa.
Stupid benchmarks
Some of the benchmarks run seem pretty stupid, for the goal of evaluating Linux for the enterprise. Whether your Perl script compiles in 0.001 or 0.002 seconds? Really? On others, it had more to do with packages, for example, PHP/5 was slower than PHP/7. That's not really relevant: If you need PHP/7, you'll install it.
That said, Clear Linux does come in ahead on virtually all of the benchmarks listed. Clear Linux is by Intel, and these tests are all running on Intel processors. I suspect this advantage comes down to some very special drivers: better instruction set usage, cache optimizations, etc. Stuff that could be made available to the Linux kernel, but that Intel has kept for their particular Linux flavor.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
We have to know!
I remember when Ubuntu was considered a lean OS alternative to Windows. Lately the bloat from bad decisions in terms of trying to add in too much eye candy has left many Linux versions with similar issues as Windows. Its actually come down to Windows 10 being more friendly to weak hardware then some Linux distro's. Nice to see Clear Linux address the fact a lot of business want the basics and not all the crap that consumers want. Wish this would rub off on Windows 10 which also loads up a ton of stuff in boot that is not needed. Be nice if a OS goes back to just being a OS.
I love Gentoo and have used it frequently but if you're a sysadmin managing hundreds or thousands of servers on hardware that's not homogenous (different CPUs, different NICs, etc) it's a non starter. Building, testing and distributing multiple builds is a drain on company resources that has to be offset by performance gains. That's a hard sell. There are plenty of companies that use Gentoo but it's generally for very specific functions and not company wide. ClearLinux lets companies get the benefits of Gentoo on a wider range of platforms then they could support themselves and without that overhead (the price you pay is Intel lock-in).
...superior performance if you have to install a commercial grade AC unit in your computer room simply to keep from roasting youself to death due to the copious heat an AMD processor emits?
Recent facts MUST make INTEL liable (yes in court) for any incident related to ME
As a matter of fact sold as a "security" it turns out to be quite the other.
To say the least.
Ditch INTEL - any distro based on a combination free of such thing is welcome
https://clearlinux.org/feature...
it's a "feature", just like the IME, creepy uncle intelirapist prowls your underwear drawer
We've know for a LONG time that Intel's compiler can do tricks with x86 that the GCC guys could only dream of.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Gentoo users are like Hatchanimals. You have to wait for them to emerge to see what you get.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
We prefer "God Emperor" to "Dear Leader", thanks. :^)
Instead of CentOS, it would have made more sense to benchmark Oracle Linux, running both the UEK (Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel), and the RHCK (Red Hat-Compatible Kernel).
I've never tried running the UEK on CentOS/RedHat/Scientific Linux. I'm assuming it's built with GCC and runs equally well on AMD vs. Intel.
Who, other than someone running it on a laptop, gives a flying fart how fast it boots?
I've got an older (580 G5) that takes SEVENTY SECONDS before the POST logo appears. I've got HBS (honkin' big servers) that take minutes before it gets to the grub boot. And the servers, we're working on a once-a-month maintenance window, to reboot to new kernels, etc.
Show me how it outperforms other distros running, say, a very large R job, or modeling protein folding. Then I'll be interested....
...for maximum performance on a box that will not connect to net?
Red Hat's "tuned" package will set the CPU frequency governor to a high-performance governor if the word "server" or the word "computenode" appear in the system's CPE identifier. CentOS's CPE contains neither, so a low-performance profile is selected by default.
Details are available here: http://jperrin.org/centos/boos...
The short version is that CentOS "out of the box" will always benchmark poorly, and you must run "tuned-adm profile throughput-performance" to get a high performance profile.
"MINIX Inside®"
So that distro has Telemetry.... hmm lets just see how fast the community rejects that... I switched from Windows 10 to linux to get away from that crap and I'm sure many others are doing or about to do the same...