5 ms·
What makes Clear Linux so much faster then other distributions?
by gen3 7y ago
What makes Clear Linux so much faster then other distributions?
- dyingkneepad 7y agoI may be wrong here, but as far as I understand one of the major advantages is simply that they have many versions of certain important libraries in your system and are able to select the one that better matches your hardware. Most distros are super generic and none of the system libraries are making use of instructions that are not present in all of the x86-64 machines ever released. It makes me really sad that other distros are not following Clear's lead here.
- gtirloni 7y agoWell, Stampede Linux had this more than a decade ago and it wasn't a big enough differentiator.
- bitwize 7y agoOther (binary) distros are solving for a different problem: providing a good-enough generic base that runs on most systems. If you want everything micro-optimized to your particular system's hardware configuration, you know where to find Gentoo.
- zlynx 7y agoAlthough Clear does it with prebuilt binary libraries. No need to compile your own.
- pavon 7y agoI'm pretty sure Clear only has a single build target. For example, their RPM repository[1], only has a single arch (x86_64) and a single RPM for each package. I think it is mostly that they (1) invested effort in maxing out the optimization flags for all the libraries (2) have a higher minimum CPU requirements (must support SSE 4.2, which was first released ~10 years ago). But yes, I agree it would be nice if other distros had two amd64 releases; one that targeted newer hardware, and another for lowest-common denominator. [1] https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/releases/32250/clear/x86_64/os/Packages/ https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/releases/32250/clear/x86...
- papermachete 7y agoThey optimise some stuff but you'll generally see phoronix benchmarks score fedora workstation the same on a lot of workloads. Its package manager is horrendeous and there are no obvious upsides to just compiling yourself from the AUR automatically.
- faitswulff 7y agoThere's a LWN article on it: https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/ https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/
- OrangeMango 7y agoThat article describes why containers start up more quickly on Clear Linux. I believe that the main reason applications run faster is that it determines which exact CPU you have and compiles everything with the flags that enable every optimization that your CPU can handle.
- oarsinsync 7y agoSounds a lot like Gentoo
- crtlaltdel 7y agoor my old slackware build circa '98-'99
- giancarlostoro 7y agoIt has all Intel specific hardware acceleration / performance settings on by default. So if you're on Intel it's perfect. Sort of wish AMD had their own Distro to see which one really is the best on their respective processor architectures. Edit: Look here: https://clearlinux.org/ https://clearlinux.org/ Under 'features' it says the following: > Intel Optimized > Highly tuned for Intel platforms where all optimization is turned on by default.
- papermachete 7y agoCompiler flags you can just add yourself to your makepkg.conf on Arch (and BSDs with their ports trees).
- giancarlostoro 7y agoMy understanding was that this is also why Gentoo is popular, since you are compiling it all anyway, you may as well compile it all for your specific processor.
- papermachete 7y agoAh, but Gentoo also supports binary releases. Useflags are obnoxious to set up.
- aeyes 7y agoNote that the tests in the linked article were done on an AMD CPU.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoEssentially I don't see why AMD wouldn't support some of the optimizations, but I could see why it wouldn't support ALL of them. That is noteworthy though, I missed that bit of the article.