Intel Unveils Clear Linux OS

Steve R. · 05-16-2019, 07:25 AM

Intel Unveils Clear Linux OS Update at Open Source Summit

Quote:

For the past 16 years, Intel has held an annual open-source-focused technology summit called, appropriately enough, the Open Source Technology Summit. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of the OSTS, the answer is simple: The company has kept the event private and self-focused until now. This year, it’s opening the event to customers, industry partners, and the press more generally.

One of the major unveils that’s happening with the OSTS this week is a new installer and storefront for Intel’s own Clear Linux distribution. If you haven’t heard of Clear Linux, Intel describes the OS as “an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization and manageability.” Forbes has covered this Linux distro and its recent improvements, while Phoronix has detailed performance breakdowns that show Clear Linux as the, well, clear winner in a range of benchmarks across Linux distros.

Just heard of this distro. Should this distro be added to the Linux distribution sub-forum?

Link to the Clear Linux Homepage. Clear Linux* Project

ugjka · 05-16-2019, 02:41 PM

How about they refund all their insecure cpu's? I literally have no trust in them anymore...

jefro · 05-16-2019, 03:39 PM

I had the prior version. Kind of basic. The newest version is supposed to be better. Downloaded it a few days ago. Haven't burned it to media yet and tested the live version.

Intel is one of the few companies that have provided drivers and kernel code for decades.

RickDeckard · 05-26-2019, 01:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ugjka

How about they refund all their insecure cpu's? I literally have no trust in them anymore...

If you're going to have no trust in a company that develops CPUs for which major and neglected vulnerabilities are found, be prepared to have no trust in anything, period. Not even Linux, because Linus himself has been hit with some pretty bad cases of hindsight over the years -- Dirty COW comes to mind.

cynwulf · 05-30-2019, 09:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RickDeckard

Dirty COW comes to mind.

That was patched in 2016: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux...dbc7d67ed8e619

But in 2017 "security people" identified a problem with the patch: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-s...y/2017/11/30/1

Linux is not security focused, so it's really non news and the same kind of problem in any other OS such as MS Windows would have resulted in shrugging and some "Windows updates"... it would have blown over quickly and "business as usual".

ugjka · 05-30-2019, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RickDeckard

If you're going to have no trust in a company that develops CPUs for which major and neglected vulnerabilities are found, be prepared to have no trust in anything, period. Not even Linux, because Linus himself has been hit with some pretty bad cases of hindsight over the years -- Dirty COW comes to mind.

It is not about security bugs actually but the fact their mitigations come at a serious performance drop atleast for intel cpus. Recent phoronix benchmarks showed the fixes bring about 15% to 25% performance loss depending on load type.

I had to disable all the mitigations via boot parameters so that i could play HD videos again without stuttering. This is an old core 2 due processor. If you have a beefy cpu maybe you wont notice, but I'm not the only one complaining about sluggishness