MSI X99A Workstation Motherboard Runs Nicely On Linux

I've been testing the MSI X99A Workstation motherboard in conjunction with a Xeon E5-2687W v3 Haswell-E processor as well as a newer Broadwell-EP Xeon E5-2609 v4 CPU. The benchmarks for that recent CPU review in fact were conducted using the X99A Workstation motherboard.

Similar to the MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard that was reviewed on Phoronix two years ago, the MSI X99A Workstation motherboard has been playing nicely with all of the modern Linux distributions attempted. As part of the testing for this new motherboard was a 7-way Linux distribution comparison where the system was tested under Ubuntu 16.04, Clear Linux, Scientific Linux (RHEL 7), openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, the Arch-based Antergos, and the Gentoo-bases Sabayon Linux distributions. The motherboard has worked out-of-the-box on these modern Linux distributions, which isn't too surprising when considering the X99 chipset has been supported by the mainline Linux kernel since its debut.

In addition to the Linux testing, I've tested eight different BSDs on the system assembled around the MSI X99A WORKSTATION. Tested for this comparison were PC-BSD/TrueOS, DragonFlyBSD, GhostBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MidnightBSD, and PacBSD. The BSD benchmarks from this system can be found here.

Among other tests carried out from this MSI X99A Workstation motherboard were some early GCC 7 compiler benchmarks as well as some LLVM Clang comparison tests.