Just installed Clear Linux yesterday, then went straight on to install oneAPI on top of it, which was relatively painless. A few comments on the process:
- oneAPI requires Eclipse, yet confusingly doesn’t install it. You are asked whether you want to install into your own copy of Eclipse, or to skip that and configure it later. Since I doubted that would be easy, bailing out and installing Eclipse first seemed to be the sensible option. I used the Scientific build from eclipse.org which is one of about a dozen options presented, and seemed to be the best fit.
- There is no GPU support in Clear Linux. The oneAPI package can use the Intel Graphics Compute Runtime for OpenCL but this is not available. Since I’m running a Supermicro “Ninja Developer Platform” with a 7290 Xeon Phi this was less of an issue than it might be for others.
- I couldn’t get oneAPI to install for all users. Again, since this is a hobby system and I’m the sole user, this is less of a problem than it might be for, say, a university sysadmin. Disclaimer: I’ve used Linux since 1993 but dislike it intensely and only rarely try out a new version to see whether it’s usable, so my failure on this point might be my own lack of knowledge.
- A comment on Clear Linux is in order. It seems coherent and usable, unlike many distributions. I did, however, have to endure mysterious hangs and crashes for no apparent reason. This happened on at least a dozen occasions and was quite predictable and repeatable. I suspect testing on the Xeon Phi x200 series hasn’t been particularly thoroughly undertaken. Considering the involvement of Intel in the project, this is utterly frickin’ inexcusable.
I can’t make a comment on whether any usable software can be written using oneAPI, that will take time to evaluate. However it does install, which is a great start.