Tweaking Ubuntu 17.10 To Try To Run Like Clear Linux

The compiler flags helped Ubuntu 17.10 a bit with HMMer.

As well as helping with the Stockfish chess benchmark.

Clear Linux's glibc is much faster than Ubuntu.

Clear Linux also was leading with the Stress-NG benchmarks. Again, even with its Retpoline patches.

From all those benchmarks, yes, in some workloads the basic tunables like switching from powersave to performance governor or shipping with aggressive but sane CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS will help in improving Ubuntu's performance. It would certainly be great if Ubuntu on desktop/server systems would finally switch to performance by default rather than powersave (or its ondemand CPUFreq default for AMD CPUs) as this is generally an easy win while laptop users may prefer using powersave.

Using the kernel configuration from Clear Linux had also helped in select workloads. But as also shown by these results, it's far from the only steps for making Ubuntu performant to compete with Clear. In most of the tests, this distribution out of Intel remained much faster than Ubuntu 17.10 due to it building its packages with auto feedback-directed optimizations, function multi-versioning, and other modern performance enhancement techniques. For fun I may rebuild the Ubuntu package archive with some performance optimized compiler flags compared to the safe flags used by Debian/Ubuntu, but that isn't something realistic for most individuals without having very high core count systems, but would be fun to benchmark.

Hopefully in 2018 more Linux distributions will take a serious look in delivering a performant out-of-the-box experience... At least now with most Linux distributions dropping their x86 32-bit kernels / ISOs, hopefully next they will take to trimming and modernizing their kernels...