Intel's Clear Linux Switches Over To GCC 7 Compiler

Just two days ago GCC 7.1 was released as the first stable release of GCC 7 as the annual update to this GNU code compiler. If you are looking for a Linux rolling-release distribution already using GCC 7 by default, Intel's open-source Clear Linux appears to be one of the first.

Today the Clear Linux team has switched over to using GCC 7.1 as their default system compiler, replacing GCC 6.3.0. LLVM Clang 4.0 also remains present on the system. They just aren't shipping GCC 7.1 as a new compiler option but have also begun rebuilding all of their packages (bundles) under GCC7.

I ran some before/after benchmarks of their GCC 6.3 to GCC 7.1 switchover. There isn't any big changes in performance, at least with the Intel Xeon E3-1260L v5 + ASRock E3V5 W5 Skylake system used for testing.

With our other early GCC 7 benchmarking, we haven't seen much in the way of jaw-dropping performance changes when testing at least with current-generation Intel CPUs. But the good news is there aren't any major regressions nor with the Clear Linux testing today I haven't encountered any breakage with the upgrade.

For the most part, the performance on GCC 7.1 is roughly the same as GCC 6.3 with this Intel Xeon E3 v5 box.

One of the few regressions was with C-Ray.

Those wanting to dig through more of this benchmark data can see this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. More data should be available with tomorrow's LinuxBenchmarking.com Clear Linux tracker when the data gets out there for this updated GCC7 build.