Intel axes Clear Linux, the fastest distribution on the market — company ends development and support, effective immediately

Yahoo

20-07-2025

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As part of its global restructuring plan, Intel has been cutting not only engineers, technicians, and managers, but also its software unit. This week, Intel officially ended its Clear Linux project, a high-performance Linux distribution designed for x86-64 systems, according to Phoronix. The company announced that it will no longer maintain or update the OS, marking the end of a decade-long effort to optimize Linux performance aggressively.
"After years of innovation and community collaboration, we are ending support for Clear Linux OS," a statement by a Clear Linux official reads. "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 are 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."
Clear Linux stood out for its aggressive out-of-box performance tuning and consistently strong results not just on Intel hardware, but also on AMD platforms, as noted by Phoronix. First, it was built using the latest toolchains that support all the latest CPU technologies. Secondly, it was compiled with aggressive GCC or Clang flags tailored to the latest CPUs, thereby adopting all the optimizations for such processors, making it particularly useful for performance-hungry workloads. Thirdly, Clear Linux applied profile-guided (PGO) and link-time optimizations (LTO) system-wide — including the kernel, libraries, and user utilities — enabling it to streamline execution paths based on real workloads and reduce binary size and overhead.
In addition, Clear Linux featured aggressive out-of-box kernel tuning, prioritized maximum CPU frequency, and featured performance enhancements for CPU multi-threading, memory, I/O, and power consumption. Also, Clear Linux was among the first operating systems to adopt the latest technologies that Intel had to offer, such as AVX2, AVX-512, or Optane, out of the box. Last but not least, it featured tools like clr-boot-manager for fast kernel updates, which improved the user experience.
The shutdown is part of Intel's global cost-reduction strategy, which has already impacted most of the teams within the company. Though the end of Clear Linux had been rumored in recent years, the company only now made the decision public. Of course, Intel will remain deeply engaged in the Linux ecosystem and will continue contributing to upstream projects and other major distributions. Other distributions, such as CachyOS, are already adopting some of the technologies and methods pioneered by Clear Linux.
"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," the statement reads. "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."
Phoronix notes that this announcement follows a week of significant changes within Intel's open-source software teams. A well-known Linux engineer exited the company, and at least one primary upstream driver lost its maintainer. Other team members working on Linux and open-source technologies were also affected by recent job cuts. Given such significant changes, it remains to be seen whether Intel will be as efficient as before in driving Linux performance improvements in the future.
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