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Comment by gen3 | Hacker News Reader

What makes Clear Linux so much faster then other distributions?

I may be wrong here, but as far as I understand one of the major advantages is simply that they have many versions of certain important libraries in your system and are able to select the one that better matches your hardware. Most distros are super generic and none of the system libraries are making use of instructions that are not present in all of the x86-64 machines ever released.

It makes me really sad that other distros are not following Clear's lead here.

Other (binary) distros are solving for a different problem: providing a good-enough generic base that runs on most systems.

If you want everything micro-optimized to your particular system's hardware configuration, you know where to find Gentoo.

Although Clear does it with prebuilt binary libraries. No need to compile your own.

I'm pretty sure Clear only has a single build target. For example, their RPM repository[1], only has a single arch (x86_64) and a single RPM for each package. I think it is mostly that they (1) invested effort in maxing out the optimization flags for all the libraries (2) have a higher minimum CPU requirements (must support SSE 4.2, which was first released ~10 years ago).

But yes, I agree it would be nice if other distros had two amd64 releases; one that targeted newer hardware, and another for lowest-common denominator.

[1] https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/releases/32250/clear/x86...

Well, Stampede Linux had this more than a decade ago and it wasn't a big enough differentiator.

It has all Intel specific hardware acceleration / performance settings on by default. So if you're on Intel it's perfect. Sort of wish AMD had their own Distro to see which one really is the best on their respective processor architectures.

Edit:

Look here:

https://clearlinux.org/

Under 'features' it says the following:

> Intel Optimized > Highly tuned for Intel platforms where all optimization is turned on by default.

Note that the tests in the linked article were done on an AMD CPU.

Essentially I don't see why AMD wouldn't support some of the optimizations, but I could see why it wouldn't support ALL of them. That is noteworthy though, I missed that bit of the article.

Compiler flags you can just add yourself to your makepkg.conf on Arch (and BSDs with their ports trees).

My understanding was that this is also why Gentoo is popular, since you are compiling it all anyway, you may as well compile it all for your specific processor.

Ah, but Gentoo also supports binary releases. Useflags are obnoxious to set up.

There's a LWN article on it: https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/

That article describes why containers start up more quickly on Clear Linux.

I believe that the main reason applications run faster is that it determines which exact CPU you have and compiles everything with the flags that enable every optimization that your CPU can handle.

Sounds a lot like Gentoo

or my old slackware build circa '98-'99

They optimise some stuff but you'll generally see phoronix benchmarks score fedora workstation the same on a lot of workloads. Its package manager is horrendeous and there are no obvious upsides to just compiling yourself from the AUR automatically.

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