Intel's Clear Linux Outpacing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 36 & Other H1'2022 Distros

When it came to the WireGuard and Linux networking stack performance, Intel's Clear Linux and CentOS Stream 9 were both much faster than the rest. One contributing factor to this significant difference is both CentOS Stream and Clear Linux default to using the P-State "performance" governor (AlmaLinux does too, albeit RHEL8 doesn't have WireGuard support built into the kernel that is needed for this particular test) where as Arch Linux defaulted to CPUFreq Schedutil and the other distributions defaulted to P-Srate powersave.

In some benchmarks there wasn't too much of a difference exhibited but commonly AlmaLinux 8.5 being in last for that RHEL8-based build. RHEL8 is showing its age but now RHEL9 is beginning to roll-out in GA and once AlmaLinux 9.0 has been released I'll be around with benchmarks there.

As we have come to enjoy over the years, Clear Linux does leap out in front for many of these benchmarks much more so than other distributions, even with the likes of CentOS Stream 9 too defaulting to the performance governor. Clear Linux also has more optimized CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS by default and other modifications in the name of delivering the greatest x86_64 Linux performance.