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

[phoronix]

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

For the past year Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has been working on the Clear Linux Project as a way to accelerate VMs to the point they are as fast as software containers and provide the best Linux support for Intel hardware in various cloud use-cases. As part of doing this, they've had to make their distribution lightning fast. Clear Linux though can be stretched outside of traditional cloud use-cases if you just want a lean and mean distribution.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22574

[nilssab]

nice!
any benchmarks of VMs on ubuntu server etc. vs on clear planned?
maybe with some bare metal reference?

[Michael]

nice!
any benchmarks of VMs on ubuntu server etc. vs on clear planned?
maybe with some bare metal reference?

Yes, many Clear Linux benchmarks are planned in due time in cooperation with Intel.

[gotwig]

Yes, many Clear Linux benchmarks are planned in due time in cooperation with Intel.

I wonder if its worth it , to use it as a working linux distro for day to day tasks hm

[rabcor]

I wonder if its worth it , to use it as a working linux distro for day to day tasks hm

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)

If this problem is solved then probably yeah, if you have the know how, know what packages you want, etc, etc then I might even jump over there in a heartbeat since all my systems are intel based and will be for the foreseeable future.

That said this distro release also raises a few questions, like what did they strip out of the kernel and what didn't they? Could be they just stripped out some dated hardware drivers and AMD processor drivers, could also be they stripped down more things (like say does the kernel still have AMDGPU, Radeon and Nouveau in it or not?, are legacy intel hardware drivers still in place (for like really old unicore CPUs) etc)

I look forward to seeing the benchmarks, but if nothing else, near instant boot time is impressive. Are you running it from an SSD or HDD Michael?

I would enjoy seeing AMD do something similar, just so that we have an official Intel sponsored and an official AMD sponsored distro, even if I do not use AMD peresonally (you never know though)

[Daktyl198]

I wonder if its worth it , to use it as a working linux distro for day to day tasks hm

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.

[Passso]

I wonder if its worth it , to use it as a working linux distro for day to day tasks hm

This distro aims virtual machine servers and will offer tools to manage them, so for a standard user the answer is "no".

Anyway it is really interresting to know how far virtualization performance can go and compare it with classical VirtualBox Xen etc.

[ultimA]

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.

[bug77]

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?

[caligula]

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.

Having less binaries is better for security. Also you sometimes migrate data between VMs. All extra data slows down setting up the VM.