Clear Linux Preparing New Kernel Options

Intel's Clear Linux platform is preparing some new alternative kernel options and they are quite interesting from a testing/benchmarking perspective.

On the Clear development list they have been signing off on new bundles around a kernel-native-current and kernel-mainline-vanilla options.

Installing kernel-mainline-vanilla will provide a mainline Linux kernel build without any of the Clear Linux patches applied.

Installing kernel-native-current meanwhile will offer the current mainline Linux code but with the latest Clear Linux patches present.

This should be quite interesting to compare to their native kernel for looking at how the performance of their default kernel compares to a mainline kernel build while sticking to their optimized user-space. The kernel-native-current should also offer a glimpse at what's to come with the latest kernel code as well as potentially catching any regressions/issues before they hit their official kernel. It's on my TODO list for running some benchmarks of their vanilla mainline kernel against their default optimized build. Ignoring their cloud/VM kernel options, they also continue offering a kernel-lts bundle that tracks the Linux LTS kernel branches.

For those wondering what patches Clear Linux is carrying, the patches can be found via this Git repository. Some of the patches are trivial/non-performance related but there is also a scheduler / TBM 3.0 tweak, adding WireGuard, enabling stateless firmware loading, a cache efficiency patch, and other notable work.