Hi guys, just come across the new clear linux in phoronix. I am a sysadmin guy. Just wondering if I install clear linux as vm guest on proxmox ve, then what performance gain should I expect. Because I thought clear linux is all about hardware-wise optimization, if I don’t install clear linux on bare metal, then should I expect any performance gain at all? hm…just wondering…
In the other hand, if clear linux is all about hardware level stuff, will clear linux grows to virtualization host style development?..i mean maybe some day just write up a web GUI like proxmox and everybody is making a vm cluster ready…hm…just wondering…
What do you guys think?
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The performance optimizations done in software are not always hardware specific and can translate to performance in virtual environments too. The Clear Linux OS VM images have been tailored with kernels and tweaks that apply to virtual machines. For example, some of the polling for hardware devices not typically found in VMs is reduced or removed for faster boot up.
I would say the best thing would be to try it out first hand and let us know what you find!
I actually tried Clear Linux on both VMWare Workstation Pro, and Oracle VirtualBox. The performance is not bad, although I am not very happy - so far, user experience with Clear under VM is behind Mint, Manjaro and OpenSuse. Although I haven’t experimented with the notorious Spectre/Meltdown patches which seem to heavily slow down my VMs. For info, my VM host is HP EliteBook with i7-8650U (4-core, 8-thread) and 32GB RAM with Windows as host OS, and I have given 2 cores / 4GB RAM to Clear installation.
I experienced the worst performance with OpenJDK Java runtimes, to a point where my IntelliJ IDE froze upon the first startup - after that, it was starting but working really slow. I will investigate further to see what causes the issues. It may be the Gnome desktop - I am using XFCE on other VMs and it is working OK.
I have not gotten around to installing on a bare metal yet; I just ordered my new Dell XPS 9570 with 6-core CPU and will try Clear on it - does anyone have experience with this machine?
hm…interesting…em…i mean i m a guy tuning cflags very deeply in gentoo…the binaries even not portable…programs are running like direct entrant…just wondering if clear linux would bring that kind of stuff to the table as default…>.^
This is not the case - we’ve been working since day one to accelerate all use cases, especially those that involve running with a hypervisor - this is why Intel is contributing for instance on better hypervisor technology, and containers.
From our perspective this makes a lot of sense - the Hypervisor makes use of the underlying hardware, so accelerating native software will also help software running in a VM.
hm…then any hypervisor-host-stack clear linux?..i mean it’s great that intel develop the whole virtualization platform from hardware to the guest…i also want to deploy clear linux as host os AND guest os altogether at the same time so to gain the most out of it…but just wondering the GUI or software development pace or related tools or if i have to install tarballs from outside or whatever…it’s great that have the raw performance from bottom to top of the whole stack (os-wise) without tuning cflags…what do u think?..hm…