Linux Workstation/Server Distribution Benchmarks For Winter 2016

First up are some disk/file-system benchmark results.

With the first FS-Mark test there was high variation on many of the distributions tested, but out in front was CentOS 7. It's worth noting that CentOS 7 is using XFS as its default file-system where the other tests in FS-Mark were using EXT4 (unfortunately, openSUSE Leap on XFS was failing to run FS-Mark).

When running FS-Mark with multiple threads, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS was slower than the rest while Intel's Clear Linux maintained a small lead over CentOS / Debian / Ubuntu 16.10.

With this third and final FS-Mark test scenario, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS remained much slower than the other alternatives.

With the CompileBench workload, CentOS 7 was the slowest while Clear Linux was the fastest. For those not familiar with Intel OTC's Clear Linux, they do ship with rather aggressive defaults, various performance optimization tweaks/patches, CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set by default for optimized performance, function multi-versioning, and other Linux performance optimizations to try to deliver leading performance on Intel hardware.