Clear Linux Working On AVX2-Optimized Qt Toolkit

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

Thiago Macieira who works for Intel and is also an upstream Qt developer is working on a change to begin supporting AVX2-optimized Qt builds within the company's high performance Linux OS. At least this AVX2 support would help out Qt3D but likely many other areas too given the performance benefits we have seen out of Advanced Vector Extensions in many other codebases.

The AVX2-optimized build would reside within Clear's /usr/lib64/haswell directory and thus for those on pre-Haswell hardware continue receiving the build without AVX2 extensions applied. AVX2 is supported by Haswell and newer on the Intel side and then AMD Excavator/Zen CPU cores too.

In working around Qt's qmake build system for handling the optimized builds, they are now discussing how to best handle such changes moving forward for other packages with peculiar build system configurations.