7 ms·

How nostalgic! Mind you, I say that in a good way! This brings me back to the heydays of Sun Microsystems where they controlled both the hardware (SPARC) and t

How nostalgic! Mind you, I say that in a good way! This brings me back to the heydays of Sun Microsystems where they controlled both the hardware (SPARC) and the operating system (Solaris). Sun didn't hesitate to use this to their advantage. With Clear Linux, I see Intel doing some very similar things. Yes, this was just a story about boot time, but it led me to take a look at Clear Linux and it looks like it could be a star. I'm interested in how much more performance their distribtuion is able to squeeze out. I'm also wondering how they're dividing their focus here and what high notes they're trying to achieve. At a strategic level, I'm assuming that they're wanting to distinguish themselves from ARM? Are they looking to create a well-tuned reference for other Linux distributions on Intel to adopt? At a tactical level, I see they're focusing on performance, availability (which boot time would be a function of)... but are they tweaking for other things such as reliability? Fault tolerance? Until now, Clear Linux wasn't even on my radar. Today, it is. Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share?

Filligree 7y ago
> Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share? Not much of one, but for a while I was playing with multiple distros trying to find the best possible power management for my laptop. (XPS 13 9380.) Clear did better than the Ubuntu installation that came with it -- but a dead octopus would have done better than that. It was sitting at 6W for non-CPU-intensive work, and was also noticeably snapppier. Windows on the same hardware sits at 8W when idling; same as Ubuntu. More recently I've tried Arch, though. Which somehow got that same workload down to 3.3W, albeit with a lot of adjustments... that didn't seem to affect performance, but did affect power use, clearly. It's just too bad that all of this optimization goes out the window if I fire up a browser, but I've had a fun time finding ways to avoid that. Apart from that, obviously Clear's software repository is far more limited than Arch's, and it also seems harder to contribute to. I don't think that problem will be going away soon.
- nobleach 7y ago
  I'd love to hear more about the tweaks you've done to Arch. I've gone little beyond a few power management things myself (On a Thinkpad X1C Gen 6). I get decent battery life, but I know it could be better. And giving up Arch would be a tough sell to myself.
  - tbrock 7y ago
    The thing with arch is it’s mostly not more tweaks that give you better battery, it’s not having all the crap that Ubuntu preloads running that makes that happen.
    - nobleach 7y ago
      Folks think I'm crazy for using Arch as my main dev machine. I'm not an Ubuntu hater at all (it runs my main server in the basement at home)... but it'd be awfully hard to go back to using it as my main machine.
      - doubleunplussed 7y ago
        Really? Arch is... boring. Once you've set it up, nothing happens without your permission and you can just keep developing away. Sure you have updates imposed on you, but you can delay them a bit if you dont have time right now, and its not like upgrades are indefinitely avoidable on any other OS. Using Arch often gives me advance warning that my apps will break on users machines due to changes in libraries. I see the changes first and can add compatibility for the new library version such that it's fixed before affecting my users. I love it as a daily driver.
        nobleach 7y ago
        Yeah, for me, it's "just right". Most detractors claim it's "bleeding edge". What? just because it's got something newer than Postgres 9.1 available?? (this was my argument against Debian/Ubuntu for a long time) Totally agree that it's a great daily driver. It has EVERYTHING!
    - 7y ago
- voltagex_ 7y ago
  How did you measure the power usage on Windows? I'm assuming you used Powertop on Linux.
  - Filligree 7y ago
    I used Powertop on Linux, yes. For Windows, I simply let the laptop run until it had used 50% of the battery. Watts = Joules / second. On Linux, I used the same methodo to calibrate against powertop. (But found less than 5% of discrepancy anyway.)
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      That's a good way to estimate but not appropriate for comparing to powertop, due to overhead. Also "50%" of energy is an estimate based on voltage, not actually energy usage. That's why Apple has stopped showing percentages in their OSes. You should use the same methodology for both.
      - jimmaswell 7y ago
        I'd assume the voltage->percentage function was worked out and the percentage displayed was thus accurate. It would be weird if that wasn't the case.
        rabidrat 7y ago
        I think it varies with the age of the battery and the operating temperature (probably other things too). Although if they were clever they could probably incorporate those parameters as well..
        Filligree 7y ago
        They use coulomb counting, along with an estimate of how much safely-usable energy is left in the battery. That estimate is usually accurate, but it can drift a bit over time if you never fully recharge or discharge the battery. Also, when the battery gets old it starts having trouble delivering full current when mostly discharged, which is why you'll sometimes see shutdowns at 5-15% remaining.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Firefox will suspend running pages when it is unmapped, so I put it on its own virtual desktop and only switch to that desktop when I need a webpage.
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    And, if you're like me and have dozens of tabs open for weeks on end, the OneTab extension is pretty awesome too.
    - 0xAF 7y ago
      I'm using "Auto Tab Discard" and I'm happy with it. It "unloads" the unused tabs and reloads them once you switch back to them.
- mycall 7y ago
  You could do further browser optimizations through about:about
- cerberusss 7y ago
  The XPS 13 9380 is available with Linux pre-installed, why would you want to mess with that? Or was it a fun/hobby thing?
  - Filligree 7y ago
    I feel that going from 8W to 3W, while gaining a more usable system that also sits on ZFS instead of ext4, is more than enough reason. ext4 doesn't detect corruption. How am I supposed to trust it?
    - cerberusss 7y ago
      It seems like a good deal but what about the support and the upgrade path from Dell? I get what you're saying about the filesystem. Personally, I use par2 for the most important things (photos).
      - Filligree 7y ago
        What about it? It doesn't seem to be enormously useful, given I can do so much better on my own. I got the laptop to have well-supported hardware, not because I was expecting a lot of help from Dell.
        cerberusss 7y ago
        Is that all there is to it, just well supported hardware? Dell didn't configure Redhat in any way, to make better use of the hardware? I'm thinking trackpad, sleep and hibernation, graphics etc.?
        Filligree 7y ago
        Ubuntu, not Redhat. And no, it seems they didn't. They haven't forced deep sleep, for example.
        7y ago
- sydney6 7y ago
  IIRC Clear Linux's cpufreq governor defaults to performance in contrast to the powersave governor, which most other linux distributions appear to be using. Hence the difference in idle power consumption, i guess.
etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
My experience with Clear Linux maybe a year ago was that it was one of the more unusual linux distro's I've tinkered with. They seem to be reinventing the wheel in many places, for example, it has its own package manager, and its own unique implementation of containers. Stuff that would seem to not have much to do with performance. Also, NVIDIA CUDA drivers didn't work. Not sure who's fault that is. Probably both NVIDIA and Intel's. All in all, it did boot quickly on AWS, but it was not a fun time at all.
jcastro 7y ago
Been using it on my work laptop for about a year now, it's nice if you want a normal GNOME desktop and cloud tools. It silently updates itself in the background multiple times a day, which is really nice, there's really no need to do manual maintenance. Most of the useful apps are available via flathub, which it comes with so you just install slack, vscode, etc. that way.
icedchai 7y ago
I think Sun must've tried and failed. Boot times on late 90's era Solaris/Sparc systems were atrocious compared to Linux/x86 systems of the day.
- bt848 7y ago
  Just to underscore this, here's a video of some guy booting an Ultra 45, the last workstation Sun ever made. It takes 30s just to go from power-on to firmware initialized and another minute and a half to start Solaris. Older equipment such as a SPARCStation 20 would take much longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjshAKzhxTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjshAKzhxTE
  - icedchai 7y ago
    On their mid-range "Enterprise series" systems (Enterprise 3500, 450, etc.) it was much worse. I remember it taking a good 2 or 3 minutes just to get through firmware initialization...
bt848 7y ago
Booting a Sun in the 90s took so long that we had the janitor go and power up the CAD lab half an hour before anyone got to the office. Whatever you are nostalgic for wasn’t a Sun.
- loki49152 7y ago
  Our Sun lab ran on SunOS 4.1.1. Its NFS implementation was so unstable we'd get perhaps an hour and a half of use at a stretch before the file server would reboot... on an 8 machine network.
  - webreac 7y ago
    When I was student, we had around 80 machines without local disk. It was working fine. They added local disks the year after with a sensible gain of performance. I loved this machine.
tvst 7y ago
Clear Linux is blazing fast (compiled with Intel compilers), and supposedly has a strong security model -- but it also has an extremely limited package selection. To the point that it's just not usable for me. Also, its package manager forces you to install "bundles" of somewhat related packages rather than just the specific packages you want and their deps. Maybe I'm missing something, but I find this very odd.
- zbjornson 7y ago
  > compiled with Intel compilers This is a common misconception. It's not built with ICC, it's built with GCC (and some parts maybe with Clang). When did you try Clear? They have about 6200 packages now, but I'm not sure if that's still "limited" in relative terms.
  - tvst 7y ago
    Oh interesting. I did not know it used GCC. It feels super snappy, nonetheless. Last time I tried it was a couple of months ago. I don't recall what it was missing, but it was some core part of my normal python development environment.
Twirrim 7y ago
> Until now, Clear Linux wasn't even on my radar. Today, it is. Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share? I'd urge some caution. It depends on your use case and the accuracy requirements you have. Clear Linux gets a chunk of its speed boosts by using compiler optimisations that most distributions won't touch because of the possibility they'll reduce accuracy and move outside the bounds of various standards, e.g. --ffast-math. Clear Linux also sets it so that by default when you go to compile stuff, it ends up picking up their "optimised" set of compiler flags too. It works, it's fine, it's fast. Just make sure you know what you're getting and what the consequences for your software might be (I'm sure most people _don't_ have strict IEEE standards to care about, for example)
alfiedotwtf 7y ago
I found it weird at first that you had to explicitly state Sparc and Solaris, but I guess we’re now at the point we’re a lot of users here weren’t around during Sun’s shine

Filligree 7y ago

> Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share? Not much of one, but for a while I was playing with multiple distros trying to find the best possible power management for my laptop. (XPS 13 9380.) Clear did better than the Ubuntu installation that came with it -- but a dead octopus would have done better than that. It was sitting at 6W for non-CPU-intensive work, and was also noticeably snapppier. Windows on the same hardware sits at 8W when idling; same as Ubuntu. More recently I've tried Arch, though. Which somehow got that same workload down to 3.3W, albeit with a lot of adjustments... that didn't seem to affect performance, but did affect power use, clearly. It's just too bad that all of this optimization goes out the window if I fire up a browser, but I've had a fun time finding ways to avoid that. Apart from that, obviously Clear's software repository is far more limited than Arch's, and it also seems harder to contribute to. I don't think that problem will be going away soon.

nobleach 7y ago
I'd love to hear more about the tweaks you've done to Arch. I've gone little beyond a few power management things myself (On a Thinkpad X1C Gen 6). I get decent battery life, but I know it could be better. And giving up Arch would be a tough sell to myself.
- tbrock 7y ago
  The thing with arch is it’s mostly not more tweaks that give you better battery, it’s not having all the crap that Ubuntu preloads running that makes that happen.
  - nobleach 7y ago
    Folks think I'm crazy for using Arch as my main dev machine. I'm not an Ubuntu hater at all (it runs my main server in the basement at home)... but it'd be awfully hard to go back to using it as my main machine.
    - doubleunplussed 7y ago
      Really? Arch is... boring. Once you've set it up, nothing happens without your permission and you can just keep developing away. Sure you have updates imposed on you, but you can delay them a bit if you dont have time right now, and its not like upgrades are indefinitely avoidable on any other OS. Using Arch often gives me advance warning that my apps will break on users machines due to changes in libraries. I see the changes first and can add compatibility for the new library version such that it's fixed before affecting my users. I love it as a daily driver.
      - nobleach 7y ago
        Yeah, for me, it's "just right". Most detractors claim it's "bleeding edge". What? just because it's got something newer than Postgres 9.1 available?? (this was my argument against Debian/Ubuntu for a long time) Totally agree that it's a great daily driver. It has EVERYTHING!
  - 7y ago
voltagex_ 7y ago
How did you measure the power usage on Windows? I'm assuming you used Powertop on Linux.
- Filligree 7y ago
  I used Powertop on Linux, yes. For Windows, I simply let the laptop run until it had used 50% of the battery. Watts = Joules / second. On Linux, I used the same methodo to calibrate against powertop. (But found less than 5% of discrepancy anyway.)
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    That's a good way to estimate but not appropriate for comparing to powertop, due to overhead. Also "50%" of energy is an estimate based on voltage, not actually energy usage. That's why Apple has stopped showing percentages in their OSes. You should use the same methodology for both.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      I'd assume the voltage->percentage function was worked out and the percentage displayed was thus accurate. It would be weird if that wasn't the case.
      - rabidrat 7y ago
        I think it varies with the age of the battery and the operating temperature (probably other things too). Although if they were clever they could probably incorporate those parameters as well..
        Filligree 7y ago
        They use coulomb counting, along with an estimate of how much safely-usable energy is left in the battery. That estimate is usually accurate, but it can drift a bit over time if you never fully recharge or discharge the battery. Also, when the battery gets old it starts having trouble delivering full current when mostly discharged, which is why you'll sometimes see shutdowns at 5-15% remaining.
aidenn0 7y ago
Firefox will suspend running pages when it is unmapped, so I put it on its own virtual desktop and only switch to that desktop when I need a webpage.
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  And, if you're like me and have dozens of tabs open for weeks on end, the OneTab extension is pretty awesome too.
  - 0xAF 7y ago
    I'm using "Auto Tab Discard" and I'm happy with it. It "unloads" the unused tabs and reloads them once you switch back to them.
mycall 7y ago
You could do further browser optimizations through about:about
cerberusss 7y ago
The XPS 13 9380 is available with Linux pre-installed, why would you want to mess with that? Or was it a fun/hobby thing?
- Filligree 7y ago
  I feel that going from 8W to 3W, while gaining a more usable system that also sits on ZFS instead of ext4, is more than enough reason. ext4 doesn't detect corruption. How am I supposed to trust it?
  - cerberusss 7y ago
    It seems like a good deal but what about the support and the upgrade path from Dell? I get what you're saying about the filesystem. Personally, I use par2 for the most important things (photos).
    - Filligree 7y ago
      What about it? It doesn't seem to be enormously useful, given I can do so much better on my own. I got the laptop to have well-supported hardware, not because I was expecting a lot of help from Dell.
      - cerberusss 7y ago
        Is that all there is to it, just well supported hardware? Dell didn't configure Redhat in any way, to make better use of the hardware? I'm thinking trackpad, sleep and hibernation, graphics etc.?
        Filligree 7y ago
        Ubuntu, not Redhat. And no, it seems they didn't. They haven't forced deep sleep, for example.
        7y ago
sydney6 7y ago
IIRC Clear Linux's cpufreq governor defaults to performance in contrast to the powersave governor, which most other linux distributions appear to be using. Hence the difference in idle power consumption, i guess.

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago

My experience with Clear Linux maybe a year ago was that it was one of the more unusual linux distro's I've tinkered with. They seem to be reinventing the wheel in many places, for example, it has its own package manager, and its own unique implementation of containers. Stuff that would seem to not have much to do with performance. Also, NVIDIA CUDA drivers didn't work. Not sure who's fault that is. Probably both NVIDIA and Intel's. All in all, it did boot quickly on AWS, but it was not a fun time at all.

jcastro 7y ago

Been using it on my work laptop for about a year now, it's nice if you want a normal GNOME desktop and cloud tools. It silently updates itself in the background multiple times a day, which is really nice, there's really no need to do manual maintenance. Most of the useful apps are available via flathub, which it comes with so you just install slack, vscode, etc. that way.

icedchai 7y ago

I think Sun must've tried and failed. Boot times on late 90's era Solaris/Sparc systems were atrocious compared to Linux/x86 systems of the day.

bt848 7y ago
Just to underscore this, here's a video of some guy booting an Ultra 45, the last workstation Sun ever made. It takes 30s just to go from power-on to firmware initialized and another minute and a half to start Solaris. Older equipment such as a SPARCStation 20 would take much longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjshAKzhxTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjshAKzhxTE
- icedchai 7y ago
  On their mid-range "Enterprise series" systems (Enterprise 3500, 450, etc.) it was much worse. I remember it taking a good 2 or 3 minutes just to get through firmware initialization...

bt848 7y ago

Booting a Sun in the 90s took so long that we had the janitor go and power up the CAD lab half an hour before anyone got to the office. Whatever you are nostalgic for wasn’t a Sun.

loki49152 7y ago
Our Sun lab ran on SunOS 4.1.1. Its NFS implementation was so unstable we'd get perhaps an hour and a half of use at a stretch before the file server would reboot... on an 8 machine network.
- webreac 7y ago
  When I was student, we had around 80 machines without local disk. It was working fine. They added local disks the year after with a sensible gain of performance. I loved this machine.

tvst 7y ago

Clear Linux is blazing fast (compiled with Intel compilers), and supposedly has a strong security model -- but it also has an extremely limited package selection. To the point that it's just not usable for me. Also, its package manager forces you to install "bundles" of somewhat related packages rather than just the specific packages you want and their deps. Maybe I'm missing something, but I find this very odd.

zbjornson 7y ago
> compiled with Intel compilers This is a common misconception. It's not built with ICC, it's built with GCC (and some parts maybe with Clang). When did you try Clear? They have about 6200 packages now, but I'm not sure if that's still "limited" in relative terms.
- tvst 7y ago
  Oh interesting. I did not know it used GCC. It feels super snappy, nonetheless. Last time I tried it was a couple of months ago. I don't recall what it was missing, but it was some core part of my normal python development environment.

Twirrim 7y ago

> Until now, Clear Linux wasn't even on my radar. Today, it is. Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share? I'd urge some caution. It depends on your use case and the accuracy requirements you have. Clear Linux gets a chunk of its speed boosts by using compiler optimisations that most distributions won't touch because of the possibility they'll reduce accuracy and move outside the bounds of various standards, e.g. --ffast-math. Clear Linux also sets it so that by default when you go to compile stuff, it ends up picking up their "optimised" set of compiler flags too. It works, it's fine, it's fast. Just make sure you know what you're getting and what the consequences for your software might be (I'm sure most people _don't_ have strict IEEE standards to care about, for example)

alfiedotwtf 7y ago

I found it weird at first that you had to explicitly state Sparc and Solaris, but I guess we’re now at the point we’re a lot of users here weren’t around during Sun’s shine