Just what we need a Linux distro who's main goal is apparently to promote Intel products. The language used to describe it makes this quite clear. "The goal of Clear Linux OS, is to showcase the best of Intel Architecture technology...". This is a blatent attempt to exclude ARM who is gaining Linux market share. Whatever innovation they might bring to the table, I will avoid it purely on the basis that its aim is to benefit Intel rather than the user. Dot org my ass.
One issue where "pure" containers have an advantage over VMs is IO.<p>For network intensive workloads, there is a choice between the efficiency of SR-IOV and the control & manageability of a virtual NIC like virtio-net. In order to get efficiency, you need to use SR-IOV, which (the last time I checked) still made lots of admins nervous when running untrusted guests. Sure, the guest could be isolated from internal resources via a vlan, but it could still be launching malicious code onto the internet, and it may be difficult to track its traffic for billing purposes, especially if you want to differentiate between external & internal traffic. SR-IOV NICs also have limited number of queues and VFs, so it is hard to over-commit servers. So in order to maintain control of guests, you end up doubling the kernel overhead by using a virtual NIC (eg, virtio-net) in the VM and a physical NIC in the hypervisor. Now you have twice the overhead, twice the packet pushing, more memory copies, VM exits, etc.<p>The nice thing about containers is that there is no need to choose. You get the efficiency of running just a single kernel, along with all the accounting and firewalling rules to maintain control & be able to bill the guest.
LWN got an article about it...
<a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/</a>
How they purport to do packaging is interesting, but I'm not sure it will work well in the end. Having "bundles" that contain immutable sets of packages sounds good from a stability point of view, but unless they are entirely self contained, you'll undoubtedly run into a library that you need to updated for one bundle that then forces you to update another entire bundle. If each bundle is entirely self contained (allowing it to have it's own set of libraries), you're essentially recreating what's a static binary through package semantics. This comes with the usual downsides of static binaries.<p>I'm interested in seeing it tried though. The learning is in the doing.
I just tried it.
it <i>is</i> fast.<p>its a VM really, but packaged like a container. On my laptop, it starts about as fast as a Docker container, ie less than a second.<p>This is quite impressive.
After reading the overview and features, I'm left wondering:<p>* what tangible benefits would I get from using Clear Linux over my own heavily customized/handrolled linux server?<p>* how does the update system handle breakage/conflicts?<p>* are any of Intel's changes likely to make it into other existing distros or kernels?
I dont quite understand what this is: Is it a linux distribution that can have a graphical interface like Gnome 3? My question is essentially: Is it more like Ubuntu or more like Docker?
Would very much like to see a comparison of Clear Containers and LXD. Would also like to know why Intel decided to do their own thing and not just help with the LXD project.
Unless I am not getting something, are the developers expected to manually compile everything that isn't in a bundle?<p>And then recompile again whenever a bundle gets updated?
Download link didn't work for me in firefox for some reason, had to paste the link:<p><a href="https://download.clearlinux.org/" rel="nofollow">https://download.clearlinux.org/</a>