A Look At Intel's Clear Linux Performance Over The Course Of July

Over the course of July, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution shifted from Linux 5.1 to the brand new Linux 5.2 kernel, pulled in the latest GCC9 branch compiler fixes, updated to Python 3.7.4, rolled out a new OpenJDK build, and had many other package updates and original optimizations applied.

With some of the systems I am benchmarking Clear Linux daily with over at LinuxBenchmarking.com, here are some of the results that saw changes on the test systems over the past month.



Linux 5.2 did appear to pull back the I/O performance in a few of the tested workloads.

But the Sockperf results that stress the kernel's socket interfaces were coming out faster for the end of July, which is nice considering the hits they've taken as a result of the various CPU security mitigations.





There were some slight improvements in some of the CPU workloads.

There were some strange regressions with Clear's boot times.

The kernel at least was booting faster on Linux 5.2.

But for the most part a majority of the source-based CPU heavy tasks didn't see any major change for better or worse during July. Though not that anything major was really anticipated since there weren't any groundbreaking software releases in July and presumably a lot of Intel engineers are taking summer holidays that otherwise would be working on Clear's performance optimizations.

So overall, the month ended mostly flat at least for the workloads we are continuously testing on a sub-set of different Intel hardware.