A Look At The Clear Linux Performance For July 2018

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.

For those curious about the performance of Intel's Clear Linux for July 2018, here are benchmarks of its state as of 1 July 2018 to where it was at in ending out the month on 31 July. Tests were done on nine different Intel systems from desktop systems to Xeon workstations/servers.

Clear Linux began July with build 23370 that was using the Linux 4.17 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and Python 3.6.5 as some of the important versions to point out for this testing. At the end of July they were up to build 24090 with the Linux 4.17.11 kernel, GCC 8.2.0, and Python 3.7, among many other package upgrades and changes throughout the month.

Their tuned CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS, compiler configuration, use of the MQ-DEADLINE I/O scheduler, and P-State performance governor remained the same throughout the month as did their standard Spectre/Meltdown mitigation techniques.

In the CPU/system-focused benchmarks, the results ended up being relatively flat over the updates brought over the past month, but like in the case of SciMark in a few instances there were some small pullbacks in performance.

In most cases though, the performance was flat, which isn't surprising considering no major kernel revisions and presumably many of the Intel OTC developers working on this highly-tuned Linux OS taking summer holidays.

GraphicsMagick's image resizing was another test case running slightly slower across the tested systems, possibly a regression from GCC 8.1 to 8.2.

The Hackbench Linux kernel scheduler benchmark also had a slight regression.

As we've seen in other benchmarks in different Phoronix articles, the Clear Linux boot time seems to have slowed down especially since their upgrade to the Linux 4.17 kernel, but even still it tends to still have among the quickest boot times of major Linux distributions.

Even with some performance pullbacks in a small portion of the tests, the performance is still likely well ahead of the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu for out-of-the-box performance. We'll look closer at that in August with some fresh hardware / Linux distribution comparisons. The monthly comparison data of the entire data-set can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.