Clear Linux Now Offers Radeon Mesa Graphics Support, Yields Speed Advantage In Some Tests

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clear Linux Now Offers Radeon Mesa Graphics Support, Yields Speed Advantage In Some Tests

Intel's Clear Linux distribution is quite performant as shown by our many Linux distribution benchmarks for delivering lightening-fast out-of-the-box Linux performance that is generally unmatched by other distributions. While the Clear Linux package (bundle) archive continues getting larger and more desktop packages are being included, one area that sadly had been left out up until recently was support for RadeonSI/RADV. Up until recently their Mesa build was just with the Intel OpenGL/Vulkan driver support as well as the software rasterizers, but now the open-source Radeon drivers are being included as well as Nouveau too for open-source NVIDIA driver support. I took Clear Linux's Radeon stack for a whirl to check out the performance capabilities.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26378

[tildearrow]

Typo?:

for delivering lightening-fast out-of-the-box

(lightening: making light, making it light... wouldn't it be "lightning"?)

[Michael]

Typo?:



(lightening: making light, making it light... wouldn't it be "lightning"?)

Yep thanks.

[schmidtbag]

Seems Vega support is a bit broken but otherwise I'm impressed they squeezed this much performance out of the drivers, considering most of the work isn't done on the CPU.

[perpetually high]

Damn, I'm really enjoying my Ubuntu 18.04 GNOME (customized as hell) but damn if this isn't tempting now to give ClearLinux a whirl on my RX 480.

What an all-star bundle: "Clear Linux as of this week during testing was shipping the Linux 4.16.12 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.28.2, X.Org Server 1.20.0, Mesa 18.2.0-devel built against LLVM 6.0 SVN for the AMDGPIU back-end, GCC 8.1.1"

[humbug]

It seems that everybody can learn something from Clear Linux.

[perpetually high]

It seems that everybody can learn something from Clear Linux.

I just think it's embarrassing, is all. All these guys have been in the Linux distrubition game for years, and get blown out of the water by Intel in their first crack at it. I know I'm being dramatic but it's not magic, Clear Linux is using common sense tweaks and the latest and greatest to beat the rest.

[droste]

I just think it's embarrassing, is all. All these guys have been in the Linux distrubition game for years, and get blown out of the water by Intel in their first crack at it. I know I'm being dramatic but it's not magic, Clear Linux is using common sense tweaks and the latest and greatest to beat the rest.

"Normal" distributions are expected to work on a really wide variety of hardware. That's why they have to make performance trade offs (i.e. not using certain CPU features). If you want the highest performance, compile everything for your CPU. That's not something Clear Linux found out...

[perpetually high]

"Normal" distributions are expected to work on a really wide variety of hardware. That's why they have to make performance trade offs (i.e. not using certain CPU features). If you want the highest performance, compile everything for your CPU. That's not something Clear Linux found out...

All I'm saying is there's no reason why there can't be an Advanced installer for power users who want the most out of their system, otherwise users are free to choose the one-size-fits-all default settings. Just a suggestion, but I think it needs to be addressed since benchmarks aren't just going to stop happening.

[andyprough]

"Normal" distributions are expected to work on a really wide variety of hardware. That's why they have to make performance trade offs (i.e. not using certain CPU features). If you want the highest performance, compile everything for your CPU. That's not something Clear Linux found out...

Also, normal distributions are expected to be able to install ten's of thousands of different packages with different dependencies. ClearLinux doesn't even have a packaging system, just a few pre-compiled bundles. It's probably got less than one-fourth the capability anyone would demand from a big distribution like Debian or Fedora or openSUSE.

Has anyone actually tried running it as their primary desktop for a few weeks? I have never heard of anyone doing it.