Debian 8.0 Jessie Testing Against Updated Ubuntu Linux

Our latest Debian GNU/Linux benchmarks following the recent GNU/kFreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux comparison are benchmarks of Debian GNU/Linux in its latest testing form for 8.0 "Jessie" compared to a stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS plus with an assortment of updates.

From the same Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system with 8GB of RAM, 64GB OCZ Vertex solid-state drive, and Radeon HD 4850 graphics, the following configurations were benchmarked:

- Debian GNU/Linux "Testing" of 8.0 Jessie with the Linux 3.14 kernel, X.Org Server 1.15.1, Mesa 10.1.4, GCC 4.8.3, and the default EXT4 file-system. It's worth noting that with the Linux 3.14 kernel in Debian testing the i7-3960X EE system defaulted to the P-State scaling driver with the powersave governor.

- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.13 stock kernel, Mesa 10.1.0, X.Org Server 1.15.1, and an EXT4 file-system.

- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS updated to the Linux 3.15 mainline kernel (from the mainline PPA) that besides bumping the kernel version forward also switches over from the ACPI CPUfreq ondemand governor to the Intel P-State performance governor.

- The updated Ubuntu 14.04 LTS + Linux 3.15 stack plus enabling the Oibaf PPA for tapping Mesa 10.3.0-devel.

- The most updated stack (ditto above) plus pulling down the GCC 4.9 kernel onto Ubuntu 14.04 to replace GCC 4.8.

All of these Debian and Ubuntu Linux benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.