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.

I'm working on an AMD Ryzen Linux distribution benchmark comparison and will have those results to publish soon using a Ryzen 7 1800X. One of the interesting distributions I was curious about its Ryzen performance with was Intel's Clear Linux distribution. It turns out it runs and there are scenarios of it having better performance than Ubuntu.

Last week I posted Benchmarks Of Ubuntu 17.04 Beta vs. Antergos, Clear Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed. Those results were interesting and as usual Clear Linux had led many of the benchmarks due to Intel's investments into highly optimizing this Linux distribution for the maximum out-of-the-box performance. For curiosity sake, I ran some fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu 17.04 daily vs. Clear Linux on another test system and have those results to share.

Developers working on Intel's Clear Linux distribution have taken to performance tuning of their stock PHP packages during their migration from PHP5 to PHP7.

When we are usually running our cross-distribution/OS Linux comparisons, we are generally using Intel Xeon or Core i5/i7 CPUs and whatever else is the latest and greatest hardware, since that's what excites us the most. But a Phoronix Premium member recently inquired whether Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would also be of benefit on lower-end hardware. So for some benchmarking fun this weekend, here are some Ubuntu 16.10 vs. Clear Linux results on an older Pentium system.

A few weeks back we learned of Intel's Clear Linux distribution working towards Steam support. While Clear Linux is a performance-oriented workstation/server/cloud distribution, repeatedly in our tests it performs among the top Linux distributions even when it comes to Intel OpenGL Linux gaming, so being able to game with it isn't a far stretch with Steam support -- there is also Vulkan support now too.

I'm still running more benchmarks in investigating the Core i5 7600K Linux performance and with even its graphics performance being slower than Skylake. I fired up Clear Linux on this Kaby Lake system this weekend and it's indeed faster than Ubuntu, though there still is some sort of fundamental issue at play with these new CPUs on Linux. But what is clear is that there are cases where the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver does perform very poorly over the mature, generic CPUFreq scaling driver.

Fitting nicely into the related discussion of Should Tarballs Be On Their Way Out The Door In 2017?, Intel developer Arjan Van De Ven of the Clear Linux project has compared various data compression options.

For those planning to do Linux gaming with Intel graphics hardware, you might soon have a new choice with the performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center.

For those craving some more end-of-year Linux distribution benchmarks, this morning I finished carrying out a fresh Linux distro comparison focusing upon the Intel OpenGL performance when making use of "Skylake" Iris Pro hardware. For this New Year's Eve benchmarking fun was Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Antergos, and Clear Linux.

Intel's high-performance Clear Linux distribution is now auto-updating by default, including for packages like Mesa and the X.Org Server.

After running my initial Intel Kaby Lake Linux tests last week using a Core i5 MSI Cubi 2 with new "KBL" processor, which was done under Ubuntu 16.10, I turned my focus to testing a few other distributions with this newest-generation Intel processor.

Intel's Clear Linux open-source operating system continues advancing as one of the less heard of but highly performant rolling-release distributions for servers, cloud, containers, and other applications.