Benchmarking The Linux 2.6.24 Through 2.6.29 Kernels

Even image resizing was remarkably faster with the Linux 2.6.29 kernel.

Our last GraphicsMagick test was image sharpening, and sure enough, the Linux 2.6.29 kernel faired the best. With all of these GraphicsMagick tests, the performance was stable between the Linux 2.6.24 and 2.6.28 releases, but it shot up when using the Linux 2.6.29 kernel. For those unfamiliar with GraphicsMagick, this open-source package was originally derived from ImageMagick, but since then it has adopted an incredible number of changes. In the most recent release of GraphicsMagick, it now uses OpenMP to provide multi-threaded image processing.

The FFT performance as measured by SciMark 2.0 was consistent between kernel releases, but it did fluctuate slightly.