Intel Shuts Down "Clear Linux" Distribution Development

[AleksandarK]

Linux enthusiasts gather to hear the latest news: Intel is officially shutting down its Clear Linux distribution after ten years of development and optimizations. As many recall, Clear Linux is an Intel-optimized Linux distribution that serves as a high-performance, optimized OS designed to extract every last ounce of performance from Intel hardware, especially Intel Xeons. As software optimizations, such as AVX-512, became more common, Intel consistently pushed these optimizations and specific pre-compiled software with compiler flags and kernel optimizations that increased performance on Intel and even AMD CPUs by a few percents. Traditional Linux distributions weren't optimized in that regard as they were mostly compiled to run on every x86 or Arm CPU, without any special flags raised for performance. This has enabled compatibility, but lacks a few percentage points of performance that Clear Linux managed to extract. As of now, these efforts are essentially terminated, and the distribution will cease to receive security and quality of life improvements, effective immediately. Users are advised to switch to another distribution. The complete statement follows.

After years of innovation and community collaboration, we're ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode. So, if you're currently using Clear Linux OS, we strongly recommend planning your migration to another actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to ensure ongoing security and stability.

Rest assured that Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware.

A heartfelt thank you to every developer, user, and contributor who helped shape Clear Linux OS over the last 10 years. Your feedback and contributions have been invaluable.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Onasi]

Oh no!

Anyway…

Yeah-yeah, technically a low quality post, but what can you even say to a nothingburger like this? I don’t remember the last time anyone even talked about CL, let alone actually ran it for any serious purpose.

 

[stickleback123]

How unlike Intel to just give up on something and go back to reaming the market for x86.

When was the last time they entered a new market and found success, rather than flounder for 3-10 years and then give up.

 

[darksf]

Oh no!

Anyway…

Yeah-yeah, technically a low quality post, but what can you even say to a nothingburger like this? I don’t remember the last time anyone even talked about CL, let alone actually ran it for any serious purpose.

What to talk about it , it just works! Sadly in the coming months I'll need to migrate to something else on my Desktop.Still it was a good job , many of the developments for CL later got into the Linux main kernel and other distributions like Arch and specifically CachyOS is often grabbing some optimizations. Just a reminder a decade ago most Linux distributions were really slow and Windows 10 was like a rocket. This days it is not the case. And just not to say that the hardware got faster these days got Arch linux with KDE Plasma on a ThinkPad W520 a notebook from 2011 and it is acting as fast as Windows 7 if not faster on it.So CL did it is part in the past decade in helping Linux being faster it will be missed.

 

[john_]

They should do what AMD does in cases like this. Give it to the community.

 

[kondamin]

And another one for "they are trying to run the company in to the ground"

 

[Chaitanya]

They should do what AMD does in cases like this. Give it to the community.

They just might put it on github like they have done with quite a few of their testing tools for GPUs.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

And another one for "they are trying to run the company in to the ground"

Intel needs more fodder in the layoff wars.

 

[ncrs]

Clear Linux has historically been a testing ground for optimizations that usually land in upstream projects, like gcc or llvm benefiting every x86 user including AMD.
The "not used by anyone" metric is a skewed one IMO since it's not really meant to be used as a daily driver distribution nor is it a stable server one. It was, however, a high performance compute focused distribution and I'm sad to see it discontinued. I hope that despite this Intel won't stop focusing on performance optimizations in open source projects.

 

[dgianstefani]

Clear Linux has historically been a testing ground for optimizations that usually land in upstream projects, like gcc or llvm benefiting every x86 user including AMD.
The "not used by anyone" metric is a skewed one IMO since it's not really meant to be used as a daily driver distribution nor is it a stable server one. It was, however, a high performance compute focused distribution and I'm sad to see it discontinued. I hope that despite this Intel won't stop focusing on performance optimizations in open source projects.

Also, it was faster on AMD processors too, not just Intel ones. Essentially one of the fastest and cleanest distros out there, shame it's being ended. Hopefully they still have something similar they use internally.

 

[_roman_]

just lol

As software optimizations, such as AVX-512, became more common, Intel consistently pushed these optimizations and specific pre-compiled software with compiler flags that optimized performance on its CPUs.

Intel has a mess with their processors. Let's be friendly and do not mention the other fail consumer products. Intel WIFI AX210, AX200, ...

Traditional Linux distributions weren't optimized in that regard as they were mostly compiled to run on every x86 or Arm CPU, without any special flags raised for performance.

I do not see where the issue is. 19 year old Gnu gentoo linux installation here. Gentoo compiles many packages from source code. It seems there are binary packages also and binary bin hosts.

I'll not bother arguing about performance improvements. Quite often I read only improvements in teh range of 3%. It's up to discussion. A bad setup of linux mint will cost much more for the disk space and speed and download size. I will only compare it to linux mint. It was the most used distro on other laptops in the past 30 years here.

I consider 10 year distro a student project. Nothing in common with slackware were I started. Suse, ...

 

[unwind-protect]

Clear Linux also ran faster on AMD hardware. The description as "optimized for Intel hardware" is maybe accurate for the intent, but not the outcome.

There were also substantial kernel config tweaks, not just compiler flags.

 

[PCL]

Am I the only one who thinks this is the fat Intel actually should trim? And up until this point, I've thought they've been going about it all wrong since firing Gelsinger.

 

[Event Horizon]

A moment of silence for this brilliant distro.

 

[mechtech]

First time I have heard of this. Too bad.

Be nice if there was a true windows OS competitor..............

 

[Pepamami]

First time I have heard of this. Too bad.

Be nice if there was a true windows OS competitor..............

we have Arch, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu

 

[sudothelinuxwizard]

Why do these knucklehead beancounters seem to be shutting down everything outside of CPUs and GPUs? If it was to reinvigorate those departments, fine, but that doesn't seem to be working either....

 

[NoLoihi]

Huh, weird, I hadn’t heard of plans for it to retire, have they given out any prior announcements? “Effective immediately” seems a bit crass, even though it might never have been intended as people’s main OS.

They should do what AMD does in cases like this. Give it to the community.

Erm, I think the whole sources are public already!? There’s mention of a GitHub repo in the article. If you want to take over, grab the sources, check the licenses and off you go! (You’ll probably have to come up with a name of your own, which it is, your own product.)

Am I the only one who thinks this is the fat Intel actually should trim? And up until this point, I've thought they've been going about it all wrong since firing Gelsinger.

Why, it’s valuable for the ecosystem to have a “known-good” distro to compare your own work to, to see if you’re getting all the performance you’re supposed to get, to name just one reason.
This action is also bad for Intel in a way. When they now want to demonstrate some new feature, ISA extension—whatever—to the world, they would now either need to host a fork of some other distro, or go begging that other distro to incorporate their changes upstream, for people of the public to look at.
It seems dumb. Phoronix has hosted numerous Clear Linux comparisons over the years, I guess it’s been a staple, even, and that whole recognition and awareness has now been thrown out with the bathwater.
So, no, I don’t have numbers as to the costs involved, but it does not seem like a smart choice to me on the face of it. Of course, if they’ve had to staff a couple dozen capable people for bare maintenane of packages, those might make up for it by improving GPU drivers and their software package in general, of course. Maybe we’ll see more collaboration with other projects fed from the resources now freed?! Who knows!

I’d like to thank everyone who has provided debunking to this audience’s preconceptions. From what I’ve taken note of myself over the years, it really wasn’t bad, the people who had some use for it, generally knew about it and used it or refereenced it where appropriate. It was never set up to bring about The Age of the Linux Desktop.

(Edited for clarity.)

 

[kondamin]

Am I the only one who thinks this is the fat Intel actually should trim? And up until this point, I've thought they've been going about it all wrong since firing Gelsinger.

This is a project that makes intel products interesting for deployment over products from other brands.
You the consumer will need to do your own optimisations to better suit the hardware, intel did it for you

 

[silentbogo]

Kinda makes sense... Clear Linux was pretty good at the very start, even worked better on AMD systems. But over time the performance gap between Clear Linux and mainstream distros like Debian, Arch and Fedora became so narrow, and general kernel optimizations made so many strides, that today there is no sense in maintaining the whole thing.

 

[RayneYoruka]

What was this again..? Not like it was prominent.. anyway.

 

[Ols-Hol]

Am I the only one who thinks this is the fat Intel actually should trim? And up until this point, I've thought they've been going about it all wrong since firing Gelsinger.

No, I agree. Clear Linux being just another Linux distro probably doesn't directly bring revenue. Better to let go of it than cut jobs in actual product-making teams and in fabs, which the layoffs also touch, so there is no excuse for keeping glorified fluff around. Clear Linux is the definition of not being core to business, it absolutely should be sacrificed before laying off process and circuit design engineers, RD, and even other software devs that directly work on product software&firmware support.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Oh no!

Anyway…

Yeah-yeah, technically a low quality post, but what can you even say to a nothingburger like this? I don’t remember the last time anyone even talked about CL, let alone actually ran it for any serious purpose.

To be fair, Clear Linux is a very good effort. It just never caught on.

 

[igormp]

They should do what AMD does in cases like this. Give it to the community.

The idea, as others said multiple times above, is that it'd be a testing ground for perf optimizations from Intel, which then other places would pick those up over time (hence why the performance between CL and other distros narrowed down over time).
It has also been open source, so I don't think there's much to "give" away.

They just might put it on github like they have done with quite a few of their testing tools for GPUs.

It has always been there since the beginning:

Clear Linux* Project

Clear Linux* Project has 85 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

No, I agree. Clear Linux being just another Linux distro probably doesn't directly bring revenue. Better to let go of it than cut jobs in actual product-making teams and in fabs, which the layoffs also touch, so there is no excuse for keeping glorified fluff around. Clear Linux is the definition of not being core to business, it absolutely should be sacrificed before laying off process and circuit design engineers, RD, and even other software devs that directly work on product software&firmware support.

I dont see how building optimizations for your CPUs is "glorified fluff".