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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."
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.
And brand new, prehacked ME binaries for easy, promiscuous access!
Because Clear Linux must be less demanding in terms of system resources consumption, thus having more resources (cpu, IO...) let to applications.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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?
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.
I thought perhaps it might be Intel's ICC compiler doing a better job of optimizing for Intel CPUs than GCC does. If that were true, and the distro is compiled with it, then that could explain the performance differences.
But now I doubt that because: (a) what I can find on compiler benchmarks indicates that GCC and ICC are about on par with each other; and (b) Clear Linux has GCC selected as the default anyway.
I wonder if some crucial parts of the system were re-coded to work better on Intel systems, at the expense of cross-compatibility (or AMD products.) That might explain why it does better across so many tools, both compiled and interpreted.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> 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
Um, yeah, optimizing , that's what we'll call it. Optimizing , I like the sound of that.
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.
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.
What we need is a Linux distro that values stability and does not keep pissing around with UIs (and APIs) with no warning.
Ok, I will go back to my BSD cave right now!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Perhaps a port from Javascript to C might help.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
Shill or worse, someone developing on javascript or java.
This isn't anyone giving more power to enterprise apps. This is a vendor producing something to create the illusion their chips are faster than the other guy. For the record, in the real world, the other guy currently has the better chips both in Enterprise and on the desktop.
Results are cooked benchmarks. This is about as legitimate as the ICC nonsense.
AMD is actually shipping the superior chips ATM and for the first time in at least a decade on the desktop and possibly ever in the Enterprise space. This is Intel throwing out some FUD because THEY took notice of that.
This old high uptime is good myth just won't die. We'll file it along with using swap memory is bad and running everything out of physical ram is betterer. These are myths that even *nix guys who should know better won't let go of. Planned regular reboots are proper maintenance, they catch problems with the boot configuration on the host. Didn't set that daemon for startup? Forgot to save that static route or firewall change? Didn't make a udev rule to give that usb device a fixed name for your configs? Planned reboots less than a month from when those changes are made is when you want to find out. You know, while the people who made the changes still work there and can speak up or silently double check their work when they find out you rebooted it. What are you collecting uptime counts for, merit badges or something?
The last thing you ever want is to break a route when rebooting to reset the rootpw to fix some other issue two or three years down the line. Especially if it is needed for something infrequently used that won't be noticed until long after that reboot is out of your brain.
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).
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
Can I email my surplus virtual heat to you for you to dispose of?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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....
Who give a toss about the speed?
Whomever wants to serve a lot of pages, for instance, without breaking the bank in the process?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
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.
This old high uptime is good myth just won't die.
True.
We'll file it along with using swap memory is bad
True.
and running everything out of physical ram is betterer.
Depends on what you're doing. Often the file cache lets us use all physical memory usefully without causing the standard issues that 100% memory use might otherwise.
Planned regular reboots are proper maintenance, they catch problems with the boot configuration on the host.
True.
Didn't set that daemon for startup? Forgot to save that static route or firewall change? Didn't make a udev rule to give that usb device a fixed name for your configs?
You're doing it WRONG. Never, ever make direct changes like that. ALWAYS update the config first, and restart the appropriate service (or reboot to start a daemon, I'll half give you that).
Planned reboots less than a month from when those changes are made is when you want to find out. You know, while the people who made the changes still work there and can speak up or silently double checktheir work when they find out you rebooted it.
Hire better people. They'd better call it out. I don't have issues with people making mistakes. Try and hide it, and if I find out, there WILL be hell to pay.
Yah, too many have forgotten about those little shenanigans from Chipzilla
Too many forgot that the shenanigans never stopped. The court decision just required them to post an ambiguous unsearchable notice that they might be deliberately disabling optimizations on non-Intel processors.