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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.
Boots faster ... ok, how often do we reboot linux ? :-)
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.
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
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.
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....