7-Way Linux OS Comparison With KVM

First up were the Parboil benchmarks. Like with the Amazon EC2 Cloud benchmarking, Intel's Clear Linux was the fastest in testing even with this VM testing that rules out differences in each distribution's CPU frequency scaling driver/governor differences and other kernel changes only relevant when running on bare metal hardware. OpenSUSE tended to follow Clear while Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is also showing some performance improvements generally over the current Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Likewise, Fedora Server 27 tended to be faster than CentOS 7 in these Parboil scientific benchmarks.

The Rodinia results aren't too different for this OpenMP benchmarking with Intel's Clear Linux still coming out ahead of the six other Linux distributions. The slowest distributions were split between Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, openSUSE Leap and CentOS 7.