Clear Linux Gets Questions Over Steam Integration, Other Plans For This High-Perf Distro

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clear Linux Gets Questions Over Steam Integration, Other Plans For This High-Perf Distro

Auke Kok of Intel / Clear Linux carried out the distribution's first ask-me-anything session today where he fielded questions ranging from Steam to under-served software projects...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-Initial-AMA

[Kjell]

ClearLinux's performance is stunning but the lack of a proper package managment system and support for installing older software is keeping a lot of people away including me.

What would be interesting is if all the performance tweaks could be ported to Debian somehow.

[Calinou]

ClearLinux's performance is stunning but the lack of a proper package managment system and support for installing older software is keeping a lot of people away including me.

What would be interesting is if all the performance tweaks could be ported to Debian somehow.

A lot of the performance tweaks done in Clear Linux specifically exclude legacy hardware (e.g. pre-Sandy Bridge Intel CPUs), so I doubt it. Smaller performance gains may still be achievable without losing support for legacy hardware though.

[flower]

A lot of the performance tweaks done in Clear Linux specifically exclude legacy hardware (e.g. pre-Sandy Bridge Intel CPUs), so I doubt it. Smaller performance gains may still be achievable without losing support for legacy hardware though.

While it is true that clear Linux excludes older hardware that's not the reason for it being faster than others.

[Guest]

While it is true that clear Linux excludes older hardware that's not the reason for it being faster than others.

Being able to take advantage of newer features in x86 chips is one of the biggest reasons why it performs so well.

[sturmen]

As for whether Intel plans for Clear Linux to become a normal desktop Linux distribution

Having never tried Clear Linux in any capacity, what's holding it back from being a desktop distro? Just the lack of package management that Kjell mentioned?

[flower]

Being able to take advantage of newer features in x86 chips is one of the biggest reasons why it performs so well.

If that would be the case gentoo (or other distributions which uses LTO) would be as fast - but thats not the case.

[Guest]

If that would be the case gentoo (or other distributions which uses LTO) would be as fast - but thats not the case.

I assume they have patches for not only the kernel, so you'd have to grab these and apply them yourself. I also don't know which compiler they use. I wouldn't be surprised if they used their C compiler for user space that doesn't depend on GCC.

[schmidtbag]

Seeing as Clear offers performance improvements on AMD, I think it's abundantly clear that older hardware is not holding it back. Of course, there could be some exceptions. For example, if Intel didn't put any checks in place as to whether a CPU has a certain instruction set, then that could cause problems on older models.

EDIT:
As for Steam support, I could see that being a real pain in the ass. Since Valve pre-packages Steam with a lot of its own libraries, that would make it difficult for Clear to get their own optimized packages in-place. Of course, not impossible, I'm just saying it's not going to be as easy as it is with other open-source programs. Perhaps it is Valve who should look into optimizing those libraries?

[Michael]

Seeing as Clear offers performance improvements on AMD, I think it's abundantly clear that older hardware is not holding it back. Of course, there could be some exceptions. For example, if Intel didn't put any checks in place as to whether a CPU has a certain instruction set, then that could cause problems on older models.

EDIT:
As for Steam support, I could see that being a real pain in the ass. Since Valve pre-packages Steam with a lot of its own libraries, that would make it difficult for Clear to get their own optimized packages in-place. Of course, not impossible, I'm just saying it's not going to be as easy as it is with other open-source programs. Perhaps it is Valve who should look into optimizing those libraries?

Clear Linux already goes far back to 2nd Gen Core -- further back then most assume. Going back further would introduce other obstacles, such as Clear being designed exclusively to use UEFI, so doing so would introduce new engineering resources not to mention QA,