The Performance Race
22 Apr, 2016
By Victor Rodriguez
As the Linux community continues to redefine the boundaries of what is possible for a cloud-based Linux distributions running on new silicon, both power and performance play an increasingly important role in the industry. The Clear Linux* Project decided to use the latest GCC technology, which can be used to optimize CPU performance on a cloud-based system. From profile-based techniques (PGO and AutoFDO) to Function Multi-Versioning (a compiler feature that is capable of optimizing the same code for multiple architectures and then automatically selecting the correct architecture-specific version of the code at runtime). Additionally, Clear Linux* Project ships with more aggressive defaults, including default compiler flags for faster performance of the resulting binaries.
The Phoronix team has measured our distribution with the many improvements we have made and they release benchmarking on us quite often. Phoronix is a technology website that offers insights regarding the development of the Linux kernel, product reviews, interviews, and news regarding free and open-source software by monitoring the Linux kernel mailing list and conducting interviews.
While Clear Linux is largely focused on Linux for containers and clouds, recent results show that you could also build a mighty fast Linux workstation around the operating system as well. Here is a list of the most important articles from Phoronix website about the performance of Clear Linux* Project: