Void Linux, Solus, Manjaro, Antergos, Sabayon & Clear Linux Put To A Performance Battle

[xiando]

Other distros should really slap themselves and wake up to what clear linux is doing. The performance difference is downright incredible.

The difference is significant enough to make me very curious as to the specifics and the kernel configuration differences. For example, preemption model probably makes some difference but how much is a good question. Voluntary Kernel Preemption has less cost than a Preemptible Kernel but it's also "less responsive". It's likely that IO scheduler also makes a measurable difference depending on workload. How much does it matter? I do not know, I am not a kernel scientist.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...810-fast-clear does shed some light on the differences. One thing that article indicates is that GCC Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) becoming a standard thing to do could be a good idea. Not sure why RedHat/IBM is against this concept to the point where they refuse to talk about it and violently silence anyone who even mentions the possibility of using FMV in Fedora.

[Danielsan]

An epic clash of titans! 😁👍

[rabcor]

These numbers are a lot closer than I've gotten used to somehow. The consensus seems to be that they're all more or less the same, but clear and solus are noticably faster in a small handful of applications.

Can we get another GPU benchmark for windows vs linux driver performance tests? I quite enjoyed the ones from march. Maybe if possible throw in some proton benchmarks too :P

[F.Ultra]

The SQLite numbers are sketchy as usual. Makes me wonder again if there is some false fflush going on here when the difference is so big on a flushed-to-disk sensitive piece of software like SQLite.

[xiando]

The SQLite numbers are sketchy as usual. Makes me wonder again if there is some false fflush going on here when the difference is so big on a flushed-to-disk sensitive piece of software like SQLite.

perhaps things like changing EXT4's commit time to the VM time helps there? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cl...mmit-age.patch

Looking at the patches at https://github.com/clearlinux-pkgs/linux and the configuration choices does hint that there is a reason for it's better performance. For example, they choose CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY instead of full preemption. They do use CFQ as a default, same as everyone else, so that's not a difference.

[enihcam]

I have been using Clearlinux on my laptop till I found that it is no battery-friendly.

[xiando]

I have been using Clearlinux on my laptop till I found that it is no battery-friendly.

See this article https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...810-fast-clear and perhaps their github if you still have it on your laptop. One of it's defaults is to use the P-State "performance" governor instead of powersave. This alone would significantly reduce battery life. There's probably other changes in it that drain battery too but that's the most obvious one.

Change the p-state governor from performance to powersave and see how much that helps. Also, install powertop and see what other kinds of problems it could have. You could just install another distro but I suspect you only need to change some minor things to fix clear for laptops.

[tildearrow]

The SQLite numbers are sketchy as usual. Makes me wonder again if there is some false fflush going on here when the difference is so big on a flushed-to-disk sensitive piece of software like SQLite.

At least they aren't as sketchy as macOS.

[edwaleni]

The only downside(s) I can think of at the moment - restricted cpu compatibility.

Runs on any brand CPU that has AVX. That be all Intel CPU's since Sandy Bridge and assorted Atoms. All AMD since Bulldozer.

That is everything sold since 2011. Doesn't seem very restricted to me.

If you are thinking ARM SVE, it wont exist until 2020 at the earliest and obviously Intel has no interest there.

[molecule-eye]

Probably no noticeable difference between distros for the things I use my laptop for, which is good news, because I don't want my choice of distro to be limited by performance figures. I mean, who really wants to run clear linux as their main laptop/desktop os?