Getting Started With Intel's Clear Linux High-Performance Distribution

[monraaf]

Even if it's not, other distributions can take a look at how Clear Linux achieves it's performance and incorporate that into their own distros somehow.

There is such distro, it is built from scratch and called Solus.
Clear Linux is made for cloud. Solus is made and optimized exclusively for modern desktop.

https://solus-project.com/2015/07/27/clear-inspiration/

[arjan_intel]

Only if all the packages you ever use are officially supported in their bundle repositories. It seems like this system would become really high maintenance when you start to use unsupported packages (as in you would have to recompile them every time you update the system, and there is no system for management of unsupported packages in place, like for example how arch's AUR has various utilities available to install, update and maintain AUR packages)

We're close to having this working/available; we call it a "mixer" because it allows you to remix the OS with your own extra content, but also to tweak bundle content etc. It's aimed at the cloud space where a sysadmin is willing to go through the effort like this for multiple computers; it's not too useful for single computer use to be honest.

[arjan_intel]

Stripping down unused kernel modules or (for VMs) unnecessary services might be OK, but how does removing common tools like vim, nano, clear etc. improve virtualization performance? The latter seems to be a dog and pony show to me.

Our install by default is a minium install (most other distros have such a thing as an option). The minimum install does not have vim/nano/etc but it's just one bundle you install, for machines where you commonly log in, that's expected of course. We're looking at seeing if we should also provide by-default a non-minimum install for convenience.

[nils_]

I think performance wise I would be interested in how the AutoFDO feature works and how much it helps. Otherwise I'd love to have a lightweight hypervisor, since I'm running Linux exclusively and as such could do without a lot of the legacy stuff emulated by QEMU. Give me a distro that's optimized for Xeon v2 (or even v3) by default and I'm even mroe interested.

[arjan_intel]

I'm not sure how this is better than Docker. Being stateless and everything. Ok, you can run it as a VM on Windows, but what else?

so we also integrate with Docker (https://clearlinux.org/blogs/clear-c...-docker-engine).
A VM is generally seen more secure as a pure native container (sharing kernels comes with limits after all). But docker isnt' an OS, it's a great tool to solve the logistics of deploying apps on top of an OS. So yes Clear Linux OS comes with Docker as well, and Clear Containers can be used as a backend for Docker

[bug77]

so we also integrate with Docker (https://clearlinux.org/blogs/clear-c...-docker-engine).
A VM is generally seen more secure as a pure native container (sharing kernels comes with limits after all). But docker isnt' an OS, it's a great tool to solve the logistics of deploying apps on top of an OS. So yes Clear Linux OS comes with Docker as well, and Clear Containers can be used as a backend for Docker

Ok, so Clear Linux brings more security to the table.
Are you guys working with the Yocto project to customize Clear Linux or are the bundles a whole different animal?

[arjan_intel]

Are you guys working with the Yocto project to customize Clear Linux or are the bundles a whole different animal?

Bundles are a whole different animal.

Think of Yocto like a grocery store; you can buy great ingredients and make your own great meal.
Clear Linux/Bundles are more like a restaurant; you can quickly build a meal from selecting higher level components

[rabcor]

We're close to having this working/available; we call it a "mixer" because it allows you to remix the OS with your own extra content, but also to tweak bundle content etc. It's aimed at the cloud space where a sysadmin is willing to go through the effort like this for multiple computers; it's not too useful for single computer use to be honest.

That's cool, but yeah I half expected it'd be something like that, considering that the distro is after all aimed at cloud computing and servers. A bit of a shame it's not aimed at desktop use, or doesn't have a variant that's aimed at it. I'll be sure to keep an eye on this when the "mixer" is ready either way, just to see what it's got.

[Alliancemd]

1. No, Clear Linux is not intended to be your primary desktop distro. It's intended for uses case like cloud and containers.
For example: Let's make it simple for everybody to build this Sphinx documentation. How to do it? Construct a light container, put in it Python and Sphinx and build the documentation.
Everybody will have a stable and reproducible way of creating this documentation.

2. It is directly competing with "Alpine Linux" which is an in-memory Linux also intended for cloud and containers. It's interesting how they compete performance wise(because of the performance claim).

3. It's strange for a Linux distro to claim that it is aimed at speed but uses bash by default...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh - "The boot speed improvements in Ubuntu 6.10 were often incorrectly attributed to Upstart", "These improvements were in fact largely due to the changed /bin/sh".

Edit:
I am also not a fan of it including in the "devtools" languages like Go and R but no Rust...
I might be misinformed but, even though Rust is younger, it already has a bigger community than R.
Just a side note...

Edit2:
Based on TIOBE Index, R is more popular, even than Go...

[arjan_intel]

3. It's strange for a Linux distro to claim that it is aimed at speed but uses bash by default...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh - "The boot speed improvements in Ubuntu 6.10 were often incorrectly attributed to Upstart", "These improvements were in fact largely due to the changed /bin/sh".

Edit:
I am also not a fan of it including in the "devtools" languages like Go and R but no Rust...
I might be misinformed but, even though Rust is younger, it already has a bigger community than R.
Just a side note...

Edit2:
Based on TIOBE Index, R is more popular, even than Go...

on bash vs ash; the boot speed difference mattered when boot scripts were written in shell; with systemd there's really no shell stuff left in the boot. Oh and we did speed optimize our bash a bit...

on rust.. our local rust fan just assured me we do provide rust in the "rust-basic" bundle! It's not a rich set of preprovided libs/etc yet (basic) but still...