The CachyOS Linux distribution has really been on fire this year delivering impressive new features and performance optimizations for this Arch Linux derived OS.
The CachyOS project published a Christmas Eve blog post to outline their numerous accomplishments for the year. They’ve been on a great trajectory this year and aligning with many of my interests as well for where I’d wish more Linux distributions would pursue. Hence this Phoronix post calling out many of their deserving highlights for the year doing much more than simple Arch Linux re-branding, documentation, or other higher-level changes… CachyOS is doing an exceptional job improving things and living on the leading-edge at all levels of the stack.
Some of the 2024 highlights for CachyOS include:
– The x86-64-v4 micro-architecture feature level support for their repository and installer… Modern Intel and AMD CPUs supporting AVX-512 and other newer extensions can these packages for enjoying the best possible performance for their hardware. Most other Linux distributions aren’t yet offering package levels at x86-64-v4 but if anything typically x86-64-v2 or x86-64-v3.
– AMD Zen 4 optimized support for their repository and installation by offering a custom repository built with the “-march=znver4” compiler optimizations for Zen 4 processors.
– Support for pre-compiled NVIDIA modules.
– Making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for compiling more packages to cater to greater performance.
– The CachyOS Linux kernel image is now optimized by default with AutoFDO.
– Bcachefs file-system support within the installer.
– Switching to Btrfs as the default file-system of CachyOS.
– Apple MacBook T2 hardware support.
– Adding support for NTSYNC in working toward better Linux gaming performance.
– Added a “zink-run” tool for easily running an application using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.
– Enabling other newer features like the kernel’s THP shrinker support.
From the performance side, the CachyOS optimizations are beginning to pay off.
It will be very interesting to see what CachyOS has in store for 2025. More details on the project’s 2024 accomplishments via CachyOS.org.
