8-Way Linux Distribution Comparison On A Dual Xeon Scalable Gold Server

[JustRob]

pretty much; we haven't had time to figure out the reason behind the boot crashes, and the behavior of crash-on-boot is very nasty in terms of usability.
Hopefully we'll figure it out soon but we're not patching the kernel stuff at all so it's just puzzling

Isn't it still possible to narrow down Boot crashes using a Utility such as those shown on: http://elinux.org/Boot_Time or to compile the Kernel normally and then create another Debug Kernel and use ARCH=um running that under the Debugger?

[arjan_intel]

So my Xeon X5650 would work great, but my 5870 would not? My machine is a 2010 Rampage III (Intel x58) water cooled and running at 4Ghz super stable for the last 5 years or so. I do not use any SATA drives (Have not for a long time) so all SATA ports are disabled as well. I boot KDE neon with Xanmod kernel and the latest MESA drivers for the 5870 graphics card. Runs fantastic. The ONLY storage drive I have connected to this Intel system is a Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro using the famous Clover UEFI Bootloader. My board does not support NVMe so people who boot using NVMe drives must use UEFI bootloaders such as Intel's old DUET or Clover (which is based on DUET), again this setup actually works fantastic. 6 westmere cores at 4Ghz and Linux on NVMe is just amazing. Wish I could afford a better video card though.

pretty much; we haven't had time to figure out the reason behind the boot crashes, and the behavior of crash-on-boot is very nasty in terms of usability.
Hopefully we'll figure it out soon but we're not patching the kernel stuff at all so it's just puzzling

[SkOrPn]

we actually provide all three, although we had reports of crashes on boot with AMD graphics (kernel crash) so we temporarily had to disable the KMS driver.

in terms of working on every platform; our CPU baseline is "westmere", e.g. 2010 era (sse4.x). Pretty much any modern-ish CPU should support that baseline

So my Xeon X5650 would work great, but my 5870 would not? My machine is a 2010 Rampage III (Intel x58) water cooled and running at 4Ghz super stable for the last 5 years or so. I do not use any SATA drives (Have not for a long time) so all SATA ports are disabled as well. I boot KDE neon with Xanmod kernel and the latest MESA drivers for the 5870 graphics card. Runs fantastic. The ONLY storage drive I have connected to this Intel system is a Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro using the famous Clover UEFI Bootloader. My board does not support NVMe so people who boot using NVMe drives must use UEFI bootloaders such as Intel's old DUET or Clover (which is based on DUET), again this setup actually works fantastic. 6 westmere cores at 4Ghz and Linux on NVMe is just amazing. Wish I could afford a better video card though.

[arjan_intel]

They only provide lntel video driver, no amd or nvidia. It is also focused on optimizations for intel cpu's, so it may not work on every platform. It would be great to see a steam machine build with it but with nvidia or amd gpu.

we actually provide all three, although we had reports of crashes on boot with AMD graphics (kernel crash) so we temporarily had to disable the KMS driver.

in terms of working on every platform; our CPU baseline is "westmere", e.g. 2010 era (sse4.x). Pretty much any modern-ish CPU should support that baseline

[TheOne]

I sometimes wonder why we do not see any new distro team build a new user friendly distro with the Clear Linux base? For the same reason Ubuntu uses Debian, why don't we see a team using the obviously faster Clear Linux? Is clear linux not open source? Couldn't it be turned into a fantastic Linux gaming system?

They only provide lntel video driver, no amd or nvidia. It is also focused on optimizations for intel cpu's, so it may not work on every platform. It would be great to see a steam machine build with it but with nvidia or amd gpu.

[SkOrPn]

I sometimes wonder why we do not see any new distro team build a new user friendly distro with the Clear Linux base? For the same reason Ubuntu uses Debian, why don't we see a team using the obviously faster Clear Linux? Is clear linux not open source? Couldn't it be turned into a fantastic Linux gaming system?

[jjmcwill2003]

Will you do a similar Linux distro comparison for your Threadripper platform?

[sdack]

Why is Debian so fast?

Obviously, when you look at Clear Linux, is there still room for it to improve. Ubuntu however, being based on Debian, did rather terrible. So I wouldn't ask why Debian is so fast, but why the others are so slow and you'd probably find your answers there.

My first guess is, it's probably because the others have more features enabled out-of-the-box, making them more user-friendly in return.

[aht0]

@Michael Would you consider throwing in OpenIndiana (Solaris) and FreeBSD? It would be interesting to see the results.
More drama, definitely..

[JustRob]

Why is Debian so fast?

gcc 7.x has some regressions on performance unfortunately.....

This small quote from the Review foretells the outcome:
"Clear Linux 17210 has the Linux 4.12 kernel, GCC 7.2.0, and uses an EXT4 file-system.

Debian 9.1 - Debian Stretch has the Linux 4.9 kernel, GCC 6.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.".

If Clear Linux used a newer Kernel they would have pooled their efforts with those running on the leading edge, same could be said for Debian and the Compiler - once I am booted and Tooled I recompile everything bleeding edge.

Takes a while, lots of fun on the way, but once I'm back up I'm sitting at the front of the class.

Clear Linux is fast due to a paid team of experts, they might have tested a different Compiler - I've been out of this for a bit but last I heard Open64 and Intel's own Compiler was doing good.

Debian is fast due to a huge team of many, some experts and some less so (but appreciated nonetheless), with GCC doing almost as good (a few years since I checked).

So while my knowledge is not as current as I'd like, to offer an opinion on this, it's because Debian is Upstream for a number of Distributions (poorly showing Ubuntu included) so work on Debian benefits a huge community and gets lots of push.

Debian Crew does their own work, receives input from other Distributions, and has some Bleeding Edgers tweaking, tuning, smashing and fixing; a combobulation of many things, great and small.