Clear Linux Could Soon Be Faster Within Containers On AVX2 Systems

While Clear Linux as part of its standard bare metal installations has long defaulted to having an AVX2-optimized GNU C Library installed by default, it turns out that it wasn't part of the default os-core bundle as used by containers. That though is changing and should yield even better out-of-the-box performance when running Clear Linux within containers.

Intel's William Douglas sent out the proposal for adding the AVX2 version of the Glibc libraries into the os-core bundle in order to get picked up by containers and other bare/lightweight Clear configurations.

It was summed up as, "When using Clear Linux in a container environment, glibc support for avx2 should be available by default considering the performance vs size trade-off."

So far it's looking like the addition of the AVX2-optimized Glibc to os-core will happen. Of course, just as with Clear on the desktop, this doesn't make AVX2 systems a new base requirement but is chosen at run-time for AVX2-enabled processors to take advantage of the optimized code-paths. AVX2 has been present on Intel CPUs since Haswell and AMD CPUs since Excavator.