CachyOS rolls out a supercharged Linux 7.0 kernel
Posted by somerandomxander@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 90 comments
Posted by somerandomxander@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 90 comments
ScootSchloingo@reddit
I haven't bothered with CachyOS in a while. Is there a way I can set it up so it has a pretty vanilla installation, on-par with what you'd find in Fedora?
TheBigJizzle@reddit
I find the lack of quality benchmarks an issue with the Linux ecosystem for the most part. I'd wish there was more. I'm sure there's many knobs to improve performance, Page size, kernels, "optimizations" from distros.
CachoOS's performance claims for example feels hand wavy. People will reply to similar post with "oh yeah it's faster" or "it's not really faster". How about a good old chart with numbers that can replicated.
I know for example they use x86_v3/v4 compilation targets. Those on specific use case can have real impact, yet I can hardly find anything on them. Arch users tell me it has little impact, their citation "my ass". Sometimes phoronix will come out with benchmarks on software no one uses.
I know it's a lot of effort, but for distros to come with any claims of performance gain, I have yet to see those backed by actual tests. Just look at the level of discussion here, anyone claiming anything about performance improvements does it with nothing backing it up.
redoubt515@reddit
> How about a good old chart with numbers that can replicated.
With respect to CachyOS, the best I've seen so far, is a Phoronix post from a few years ago (pg 5). I don't know how much has changed since that time, but they ran CachyOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, EndeavourOS (Arch essentially) and Clear Linux through \~100 benchmarks and then calculated the geometic mean of all 100.
Clear Linux was the only distro that separated itself (by 6.5%), CachyOS did not separate itself from the pack or outperform mainstream distros overall. An interesting thing about the finding is that while CachyOS had the second most first place finishes in individual benchmarks, it still came in 2nd to last place overall (across all \~100 benchmarks). What that indicates to me is that it had sizeable improvements in a limited number of tasks, but no meaningful improvement (or outright degradation) in a larger number of tasks. But this was like 3 years ago so I'm not sure how much has changed or remained the same.
nevertalktomeEver@reddit
Devil's advocate in me speaking, as someone who agrees that the lack of benchmarks across Linux is disappointing:
It is really hard to make benchmarks for Linux. The systems provide much less reproducible results than on Windows due to how much distributions' settings, tweaks, package versions, kernel configurations / versioning and many, many other factors can cause the results to vary.
Steve from Gamer's Nexus made a great video with some benchmarks they made on Linux, while also describing many of the downfalls and issues they faced whilst performing their benchmarks. Much of this had to do with the fact their process is quite automatic and tooled well for Windows already, and the fact that this process needs entirely re-done for Linux as a whole.
It has to be done manually, meaning these benchmarks can't be done often, and the market share for Linux is still quite small, even if the growth is promising. That being said, since by nature, Linux has no standard, reference distribution for testing; it makes settling on one home for a testing environment that much more difficult. It is very hard to guess what the single most standardized distribution could be for a benchmark. They settled on Bazzite, which I think given their circumstances, made perfect sense.
This is on top of the fact that certain things (particularly gaming) have benchmarks that vary wildly daily. Proton receives patches so regularly across the Experimental branch and forks of itself that it makes tracking issues and solutions down dizzyingly difficult. DankPods did a really great video himself about how rough the out-of-the-box experience of Linux gaming can be for someone who is a novice to this kind of thing, and for someone who isn't interested in doing tweaks and configurations to solve all the problems. That's going to end up being most users, meaning a benchmark that uses defaults is going to be much more impactful and meaningful than one that had to find solutions to problems to even get things to run.
Of course, benchmarks are also important in many other fields such as I/O. I think Michael at Phoronix does a pretty good job providing thorough explanations for the methodology behind each test and providing easily readable charts. I imagine the lack of frequency in doing so has to do with time associated in performing the benchmark itself, just like how Steve mentioned the benchmarks for Linux will be far, far more infrequent than they are for Windows until the landscape isn't shifting so much.
BinkReddit@reddit
Why not just use the default configuration of a distribution?
nevertalktomeEver@reddit
Because many distros aren't configured like the other. Linux Mint, as an example, is vastly different to Ubuntu and Debian, despite being based on both of them.
Framed-Photo@reddit
Well yes, but I think all they meant is that they can do the benchmarks, and specify the distro/version of said distro, then the benchmark is reproducable.
If you do a benchmark on say, Mint 22.3 cinnamon, then presumably other benchmarks done on that same version will work the same if you don't upgrade drivers or something.
nevertalktomeEver@reddit
Ah, but you see, that's where things already ran astray. "If you don't upgrade drivers." What if someone's benchmark is based on the performance of Nouveau, or perhaps a beta version of the NVIDIA driver? What if they're using the latest stable NVIDIA driver, but they're using the latest hardware that has yet to receive proper support? The RTX 5xxx series for NVIDIA is a good example of a launch that was really rocky, to the point that each driver version represented large changes.
Framed-Photo@reddit
Then they'd be different benchmarks? This is also what happens on Windows when you benchmark with different driver versions, it's a solved issue.
Then it's not a valid benchmark? Again, this is also a problem on Windows, and it's also a solved issue there too.
Which is why reputable tech media outlets tell you the driver/OS versions when they do benchmarks so you could try to repeat them if you wished.
All of these things work on Linux, the difference is that you just need to ensure you have the same base OS, which again, is also how it works on Windows.
nevertalktomeEver@reddit
Right, but the thing I'm pointing out in particular is that this is just one variable to look out for from a Linux benchmark. There are much, much more variables on Linux.
retiredwindowcleaner@reddit
debian stable is the fastest! not even kidding
Maleficent-One1712@reddit
Are there benchmarks?
UnbondedIron@reddit
If you're comfortable with Arch, you don't need to switch. I think the performance difference is minimal. I think that most distros have similar performance if set up properly. CachyOS just makes the task a lot simpler.
NeuroXc@reddit
It is extremely noticeable for certain tasks. Things like video encoding can be 30-50% faster from CachyOS's use of clang and additional performance optimizations. However, if you're an ordinary user who does ordinary tasks that are not CPU intensive, you probably won't notice a difference.
That being said, migrating from Arch to Cachy is extremely easy and low risk. There is an official script to do it without having to reinstall your system, because Cachy is mainly just a set of additional repos on top of Arch.
GlutenFreeToaster@reddit
Same here, I can set up and use Arch just fine on my own but Cachy is just ready to go. I used to use EndeavourOS for that purpose, but Cachy has since caught up and surpassed it in features I want out of the box.
nicman24@reddit
and has zfs modules in repo
RB5Network@reddit
There's quite a few at this point. There's definite performance improvements, particularly around latency. But of course they are quite minor and you likely won't feel a difference.
I love CachyOS for it's defaults. It's Arch with everyone I would want out of the box.
t0gnar@reddit
Yeah, CachyOS is a really great Arch derivative. I´m running Fedora on my laptop, because I just need it to work and I like recent stuff.
But I´m having the urge to completely purge Windows from my gaming desktop and just setup Cachy.
The time I used on my laptop was really nice.
lixia@reddit
done that last year. So happy I did.
clearlybreghldalzee@reddit
Latency? Where? I couldn't find hard measurements of anyrhing? And latency what are we talking about?
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
its not true they arent actually using any tools to measure click to photon latency, but a lot of their defaults have other benefits but could also cause problems its basically gambling. sched ext schedulers dont improve latency over eevdf bore (eevdf used to not be mainline, bore still isnt i think) but sched ext schedulers are way smarter
for example if i compile something stock cant keep my game or even sometimes normal apps like web browsers running at more than 15fps, and on stock a coredump will cause my audio to stop playing until its done eating my cpu.
Almost certainly the biggest benefit of cachyos would likely be consistency/0.1% 1% lows and better frametimes and not latency
The best tweak to improve latency right now (AMD_USERQ=1) is too buggy for them to enable and unless you're running linux-next 7.1 you will randomly kernel panic when switching in and out of direct scanout but I can attest its like one of those things where you try it and once youve done it it feels terrible once you turn it off.
userq is basically required to beat windows' latency becsuse im pretty sure they have had this feature for a while now, all real benchmarks of windows vs linux latency show windows winning because of primarily this I'm pretty sure
ImNotABotScoutsHonor@reddit
its* defaults
UnbondedIron@reddit
I agree completely.
H0t4p1netr33S@reddit
I love Cachy bc it’s lets me pick which boot loader I want and that’s actually forced me to learn more about them instead of just accepting whatever was default.
rcoelho14@reddit
I love CachyOS on my laptop because it configured the dual-gpu properly without me having to rip out my hair, like Fedora was making me do.
And it does seem to work pretty wonderfully in general, the maintainers did a great job.
Loving Fedora on my all AMD desktop, though, pretty good distro.
aeiedamo@reddit
You can switch to their repos and test if there's any performance improvement.
Maleficent-One1712@reddit
Hm interesting, but how risky is that? I also use this PC as workstation and don't want to screw things up.
TheOneTrueTrench@reddit
If you're using btrfs or zfs, just take a snapshot first.
That's one of the best parts of using one of those, with snapshots of your entire OS, you can try crazy shit all the time, and just rollback, or clone the OS to a different dataset and boot that instead.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
you cant just rollback from the boot menu without "just rollback" becoming 20 commands of setup and reading 20 wiki pages
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
the most likely thing to happen is your keyring gets messed up and you just give up and disable signature checks so you can update to get the new keyring files
jamesthethirteenth@reddit
You can also just switch the kernel. It worked so well I activated all their repos, kept my configuration, no problems.
Far_Calligrapher1334@reddit
I've swapped back and forth several times with no problems
no-sleep-only-code@reddit
The kernel can be swapped at runtime, shouldn’t be risky at all. Worst case (and extremely unlikely) it crashes and you swap back.
aeiedamo@reddit
It works just fine in my experience. You can go back to the Arch repos at any moment or just make the CachyOS repos secondary to Arch. I just use their new kernel, but everything else is the same Arch packages.
i-hate-birch-trees@reddit
That's what I've done, migrated from ALHP. Seamless and easy.
ficiek@reddit
Many of the benchmarks were accused of being within the statistical error so...
redoubt515@reddit
The benchmarks I've seen have not shown CachyOS to be meaningfully better. While there are a few specific benchmarks or applications where you may see meaningful improvements, most benchmarks I've seen show that in terms of general performance the difference is between negligible and small (single digits %)
For all of the time I've been involved in Linux (10+ years) there is some distro or project promises 'performance' and tweaks and optimizations, and I've yet to see any that can really deliver on that promise more than a couple % without making tradeoffs that negatively impact other goals (compatibility, reliability, security, usability)
These benchmarks are a few years old now, but Phoronix ran Cachy and some other distros through 100 benchmarks, and found that the average performance was pretty indistinguishable between Fedora, EndeavourOS (Arch), Ubuntu, and CachyOS, the only distro they tested that did meaningfully better than the rest was Clear Linux, which performed 6.5% better.
tapo@reddit
For gaming specifically I feel like a lot of people don't realize most games are running in a container. Steam runs everything in Steam Linux Runtime, including Proton. This means you're bypassing libraries that are newer or optimized by Cachy.
Far_Calligrapher1334@reddit
Doesn't Arch offer a system runtime version of Steam?
tapo@reddit
Steam itself runs every game in Steam runtime and removed native support at the end of 2024. It's not about how Steam is packaged.
hotchilly_11@reddit
I’ve seen people report that when gaming they have much better 1% lows, even if on the average case the performance is about the same
Maleficent-One1712@reddit
I didn't want to step on toes of CachyOS fans, but yeah the benchmarks I've seen seem negligible and not worth spending a whole day configuring a new Linux install.
Far_Calligrapher1334@reddit
Its worth it if you already run Arch since its just adding a repo and updating, but beyond that, yeah, not worth.
jkflying@reddit
Nix is good for hermetic reproducible systems, but not for performance.
Ezmiller_2@reddit
CachyOS is more useful to me because Nix doesn't make any sense to me.
gamas@reddit
My general observation is that in most cases the improvements are minimal, but its only really noticeable when dealing with old hardware.
murlakatamenka@reddit
FLAC encoder compiled for v3 show very measurable encoding speed boost, for example
Lawnmover_Man@reddit
I mean... that's kinda nice. But also... who needs that? I have an 18 year old CPU with just 2.66 GHz. Encoding an album with default settings just takes 17 seconds. And if I encode multiple albums at once, I'm not sitting there watching the progress bar anyway.
Ezmiller_2@reddit
Your experience will vary.
gamas@reddit
Yeah, like I use CachyOS but not for some magical performance reason, i just like the fact that everything is just setup out of the box.
Ezmiller_2@reddit
Exactly! I put it on my Ivy Bridge i7 laptop, an HP envy Skylake desktop i5 w/ddr3L, and my Ryzen 3700x gaming rig. They all performed good, with the laptop being the worst because of the screen tearing. That one I noticed was super aggressive on the fan, and also suspend/sleep didn't work correctly coming out of sleep. But I think nouveau was being a stick in the mud with that one.
hotchilly_11@reddit
do you care about 1% lows or latency? if not then probably not worth it but stutters and frame timing when gaming are definitely better on cachy which is why i ended up frankensteining my arch install with all the cachy os tweaks
zabby39103@reddit
It's not huge, it's measurable. Sometimes it's slower than other distros but that's more to do with configured default settings than it is with custom compiling.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43
chemistryGull@reddit
Those performance improvements are mostly esoteric. Still use cachy because its very nice ootb experience (like limine with snapper support enabled by default)
Liarus_@reddit
there is no t in CachyOS
NotQuiteLoona@reddit
There is no need to use CachyOS if you are already okay with your Arch installation. I personally use CachyOS as a shortcut, as it does a lot of things I would've done myself either way, and recommend it when a user wants to use their PC but also for it to be a little bit more user-friendly.
PeerlessYeeter@reddit
Is it supercharged enough to get a performance boost? Or is It just going to blow more hot air?
no-sleep-only-code@reddit
Will be nice when the LTS version updates for those with Nvidia cards.
unconceivables@reddit
Why do you need LTS? I never use the LTS kernel and my 5090 and 4090 work fine.
jadbox@reddit
I have nvidia 4090 and don't use LTS without issue.
no-sleep-only-code@reddit
How do you compile the drivers?
jadbox@reddit
I just install them via paru
QirexChuddie@reddit
my wifi works so I don't care.
rainbowroobear@reddit
have they fixed performance regression in bore?
jacobcantspeak@reddit
Any source/discussion for this? Would love to learn more to see if I’m currently taking a hit with bore
bunkbail@reddit
in cachyos discord
repocin@reddit
Fuck discord. They've got a forum, why can't they use that for discussions so it can actually be searched for later?
KHTD2004@reddit
The performance on BORE is slightly worse than the default kernel, I tested both using the preinstalled Cachy benchmark tool on kernel 6.18. back then I think, the hit isn’t that bad but it’s there, that’s why they took BORE out of the default kernel again (website still says BORE is in the main one if I remember correctly)
KHTD2004@reddit
I don’t think so, that’s why BORE isn’t in the main kernel currently, you can still install the BORE one if you want
Prismatic-Ray@reddit
Is this one coming to bazzite? I think they announced a gaming kernel initiative
Xatraxalian@reddit
I'd never install this 🫣
Moving way too fast for my liking to even consider it for my daily rig. I already feel like a heretic that I have moved to Debian Testing to get newer drivers, firmware and mesa faster for my RX 9070 XT.
Different horses for different courses though. Some people who use their system for gaming only may like or want this.
SavageFromSpace@reddit
In my experience I've had more issues doing do-release-upgrades than I have with rolling release
ficiek@reddit
Yep, rolling release = small problems sometimes, no rolling release = all problems at the same on upgrade, possibly impossible to solve.
Maleficent-One1712@reddit
I was reluctant at first for rolling releases, but now I've been using it for a few years it feels a lot more natural flowing than those big distro upgrades. I don't think I want to go back.
SavageFromSpace@reddit
Same, my personal take on it is the rolling release nature closer follows distributed dev work as state b -> c -> d -> e as each release happens is much easier to manage than state b -> e
someonesmall@reddit
Why is this getting downvoted? Different users with different needs and preferences, that is what the Linux community is about.
Xatraxalian@reddit
Probably because I bluntly said "I'd never install this."
But it's true. Arch moves fast by very quickly including just-released stuff. I could live with that for something like a gaming system. CachyOS moves even faster by adding custom patches and even backporting changes from a kernel version that hasn't even hit the release candidate stage yet. It creates a kernel that Frankenstein'ed from combining different versions.
That is insane to me. You -can- go TOO fast.
wintrmt3@reddit
Check your kernel version, debian uses kernels full of random patches.
Xatraxalian@reddit
Debian never does anything at random. It is precisely documented what they do and why they do it. It is one of the reasons I use Debian.
ginopilotino667@reddit
I'm a happy cachy user. But your arguments are right. I handle the 'arch way' (sometime i make stupid things) since a few years with an combination of zfs-root with zfs-bootmenu. If something is wrong, I just roll back. I frankensteined it a bit more with using guix for all my serious stuff;)
Secret_Conclusion_93@reddit
Because it's not contributing anything tbh.
Other people discussing the technical aspect and what is still missing (like the BORE comment).
This guy here just ranting for the sake of rant.
gamas@reddit
That's kinda the thing really, The gaming side of Linux is moving too fast for fixed releases currently. Fedora had to allow leeway with how they handle drivers to recognise that.
Recipe-Jaded@reddit
I had to switch back to vanilla arch a while back. Cachy pushed an update that made my wifi stop working
Maleficent-One1712@reddit
I'm using Arch on my workstation for 1.5 years now, which is pretty cutting edge. Never had major issues, maybe once a month a minor one that's easy to fix. Linux has come a long way.
HateSucksen@reddit
Flair checks out.
crshbndct@reddit
I love cachyos but I have just had too many issues with their kernel tweaks, and how it handles my GPU. I was told all AMD was a good choice for Linux but for whatever reason it locks the entire machine up after I login with KDE Plasma, about 50% of the time. I can’t even SSH in the machine just crashes hard. Doesn’t happen with any other kernel.
BashfulMelon@reddit
Backporting that new NTFS driver seems pretty risky. I assume it's not enabled by default?
PurepointDog@reddit
I think it was already merged and they just flipped the flag to enable it one minor release early. It doesn't seem like they backported it or anything.
w2qw@reddit
It's was merged after the 7.0 release. Still a backlog if a minor one though.
Maskdask@reddit
And if you're on NixOS you can just yoink the CachyOS kernel and get the best of both worlds