Clear Linux Achieved Even More Performance Improvements During April

[Vistaus]

I understand the legal issues of distributing proprietary codecs

Intel has plenty of money to pay royalties.

[skeevy420]

I believe a lot of their changes require a reasonably modern processors (with SSSE4 support for example) and no other distro wants to limit their user base like that.

Sandy Bridge and up. It's AVX support they're after. IIRC, their compiler uses march=sandybridge mtune=skylake.

[Spooktra]

I believe a lot of their changes require a reasonably modern processors (with SSSE4 support for example) and no other distro wants to limit their user base like that.

That's not true, SSE4 (no such thing as SSSE4) has been around since the Penryn, you wouldn't be "limiting" your user base by requiring it for your distro. The reality is that compiling the whole distro with cpu specific optimizations does not have the performance benefits one would think, as evidenced by OpenMandriva:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=openmandriva-40a-znver1&num=1

Here's the thing, assume you had a beafy 10C/20T cpu that supported AVX-512 and decided that you would compile your entire distro and all the applications with flags that enabled AVX-512 optimized code paths, one would think that this distro would scream, but I don't think it would, in fact in many workloads it would probably be slower and here's why:

There are only a limited number of overall resources, such as registers and cache, available on the processor, if everything from the kernel, to the desktop manager, to the GUI, to the API's, and the entire app are hitting up the SIMD units then the critical parts of the app that can benefit from the vectoization have to contend with the non-critical OS parts that do not benefit from vectorization. Apps like x265 and Intel's SVT encoders, that make heavy use of AVX-512 would run slower on such a distro.

[Templar82]

What exactly prevents other distributions from building at least some critical packages this way?

I believe a lot of their changes require a reasonably modern processors (with SSSE4 support for example) and no other distro wants to limit their user base like that.

[microcode]

It seems like many of these gains are preferable on any distro. What exactly prevents other distributions from building at least some critical packages this way? A marginal improvement in, for example, a JPEG decoder library, could considerably improve the experience of browsing the web.

[ms178]

Clear Linux is more of a show-case distribution. Intel doesn't really have interest in investing in a zero return-on-invest market that the Linux desktop is.

As Microsoft and Apple are doing some ARM work nowadays, this reasoning could change rather quickly. Intel could try with other interested parties to push Linux as a gaming platform, too. They could squeeze the last bit of performance of their CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs and show the world what the performance on their hardware with the best possible software optimizations looks like.

[ms178]

Mario Junior I'm waiting to use Clear when they don't expect their users to have to compile basic libraries to achieve basic functionality. I understand the legal issues of distributing proprietary codecs, but other distros have figured out how to separate free and non-free software, and until I can watch h254/265 videos on Firefox or mpv easily, it is not being installed on my computers. I would use it in a flash if this gets resolved! (I have a Haswell CPU and an AMD HD 7750 GPU -- not likely to be supported by Clear even when they do get ffmpeg issues resolved!)

That is one of the items I hope that Intel will address if they want to get a better foothold in the Linux desktop market. Chromium with VAAPI patches included is another. Thinking from the end user perspective and the best possible experience is the key here.

[OpenSourceAnarchist]

Mario Junior I'm waiting to use Clear when they don't expect their users to have to compile basic libraries to achieve basic functionality. I understand the legal issues of distributing proprietary codecs, but other distros have figured out how to separate free and non-free software, and until I can watch h254/265 videos on Firefox or mpv easily, it is not being installed on my computers. I would use it in a flash if this gets resolved! (I have a Haswell CPU and an AMD HD 7750 GPU -- not likely to be supported by Clear even when they do get ffmpeg issues resolved!)

You just discovered, it's easy to create a distro that's fast if you ignore the need for basic functionality.

If you remove your operating system, you'll get the best case scenario where 0 CPU cycles are used to run it, it's so fast that it doesn't even have boot times, as your firmware will show an error rather than running your operating system.

[Spooktra]

Using Clear Linux here but i can't compile the goddamn ffmpeg with x264 and x265 support because libx264-dev and libx265-dev aren't available on CL bundles and compiling x264 and x265 mannualy, ffmpeg can't find both on compile. Another thing is Firefox doens't play mp4 or gif files. This is annoying!

Oh, i forgot: gnome don't show thumbnails.

You just discovered, it's easy to create a distro that's fast if you ignore the need for basic functionality.