Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution is preparing to be one of the first distributions relying upon LLVM 8 (and Clang 8) out-of-the-box as the latest major release for this widely-used compiler stack.

While we have looked extensively at the performance of generated binaries of user-space applications built under GCC 9, soon we'll be able to benchmark a complete system image built under this annual compiler update to the GNU compiler as Clear Linux is planning a quick roll-out of the soon-to-be-released compiler.

For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.

Stemming from Clear Linux detailing how they optimize Python's performance using various techniques, there's been reader interest in seeing just how their Python build stacks up. Here's a look at the Clear Linux Python performance compared to a few other configurations as well as Ubuntu Linux.

Clear Linux's leading performance isn't limited to just C/C++ applications but also scripting languages like PHP, R, and Python have seen great speed-ups too. In a new blog post, one of Intel's developers outlines some of their performance tweaks to Python for delivering greater performance.

While Intel's Clear Linux is known to the most of you for its speed, it's also a distribution that is very easy to build off of for specific use-cases should you want your own pre-configured Linux OS.

Solus founder Ikey Doherty who is back working for Intel on the Clear Linux team and brought the Linux Steam Integration (LSI) into that fold has issued a new release of this software for improving the Steam integration on Linux.

As another optimization for Intel's Clear Linux distribution, a "libSuperX11" library is being considered that fundamentally changes how the X.Org libraries are handled.

For those that may have been wanting to try out Clear Linux of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center on desktops/workstation, it's now easier to do thanks to a new "desktop live" image accompanied by a new OS installer to make it more akin to conventional desktop Linux distributions.

Intel's Clear Linux distribution is making progress on their new installer, including the ability to (finally) carry out encrypted installations.

While Clear Linux augments their package/bundle archive with Flatpak support on the desktop, they are currently deciding whether to also support Snaps that are commonly associated with Ubuntu Linux.

Imad Sousou of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced their plans to develop a safety-critical Linux distribution. This Linux distribution will be geared for running on safety-compliant solutions from autonomous vehicles to drones and more.

Given our fascination with Intel's Clear Linux performance in the plethora of performance benchmarks we frequently run at Phoronix and this open-source operating system being maintained in a rolling-release style, here's a look at how the performance for this x86_64 Linux distribution evolved over the past month.

While the kernel configuration is just one part of Intel's Clear Linux optimizations for their performance-oriented distribution, a Fedora user has taken the liberty of spinning a Fedora kernel build based upon Clear Linux's kernel configuration.

At the end of last year the Intel Clear Linux project's Clear Containers initiative morphed into OpenStack's Kata Containers. Clear Linux now supports the resulting Kata Containers.

While Intel's Clear Linux platform has already been making use of GCC 8.1 since shortly after its release in early May, one of their developers has now published a blog post highlighting three performance and security features enjoyed and that helps benefit their performance-oriented Linux distribution.

Given Clear Linux is a "rolling release" Linux distribution with new releases often being put out multiple times per day, and a lot of the emphasis by Intel on their open-source Linux distribution being performance, I decided it would be fun to start providing a monthly look at how their performance has been evolving.

One of the latest package optimizations being worked on within Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux camp is a faster Qt5 tool-kit.

Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux operating system is already preparing to ship GCC 8.1 as the default compiler and over the days ahead will be rebuilding all of their packages under GCC8.

If you have been a Phoronix reader for any decent amount of time, you have likely seen how well Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues to run in our performance comparisons against other distributions. The developers behind this Linux distribution have begun a new blog series on "behind the magic" for some of the areas they are making use of for maximizing the out-of-the-box Linux performance.

While Python 3 has been around now for a decade, most Linux distributions are still working towards moving away from Python 2 and that includes Intel's Clear Linux distribution.

While Clear Linux may be extremely performant as shown in our many benchmarks, its default repository serving "bundles" (their task-based approach to package management) can be a bit light if wanting to use this Intel open-source Linux distribution on the desktop. There has been yum available via a bundle while now next-gen Yum, DNF, is also now available on Clear Linux.

Intel's own Clear Linux distribution has now been updated with protection for addressing the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities disclosed last week.

One of the approaches Intel's Clear Linux distribution uses for achieving greater performance is by shipping AVX2 (and even now AVX-512) optimized libraries with their OS that are then automatically used if the detected host CPU is AVX equipped. Solus is making use of this approach now for striving for better Linux gaming performance.

Intel's performance-driven Clear Linux operating system is now available via the Amazon AWS marketplace for easily running this distribution in the EC2 cloud.

As part of our ongoing AMD EPYC Linux benchmarking, I've been working this week on a cross-distribution GNU/Linux comparison followed by some BSD testing... Of course, I couldn't help but to see if Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would run on the AMD EPYC server.

For those mesmerized by the numbers whenever posting a cross-distribution comparison like the recent Core i9 7900X vs. Threadripper 1950X On Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos, Clear Linux with showing Intel's performance optimizations done on Clear Linux, Intel engineer Victor Rodriguez presented this week at the 2017 Open-Source Summit North America about some of their Linux performance boosting work.

For those curious about the GCC versus LLVM Clang compilers with Intel's new Core i9 7900X, earlier this month I had ran some compiler benchmarks on this high-end processor.

Intel's Clear Linux distribution has switched from using the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver for recent generations of Intel hardware to now using the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

The desktop-focused, performance-oriented Solus Linux distribution has pulled in another component from Clear Linux: clr-boot-manager. The clr-boot-manager is responsible for solid kernel and boot-loader management.