The Performance Impact Of Fedora 19 Updates

With Fedora more liberally pushing down package updates compared to Ubuntu Linux and other fixed-release distributions, how has the performance evolved since the release of "Schrödinger's Cat" in early July? Here's some benchmarks showing how the Fedora 19 performance has evolved with a newer kernel and other changes.

Fedora 19 originally shipped with the Linux 3.9 kernel but pushed down since then has been Linux 3.10 as a package update (presently at Linux 3.10.4-300.fc19), a point release bump to the X.Org Server, and various other updates to key system components.

Having a clean Fedora 19 installation this week on the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU system, I carried out some benchmarks comparing a clean install of F19 Schrödinger's Cat to then all available package updates as of 9 August. Various benchmarks stressing different subsystems were handled via the industry-rated Phoronix Test Suite software.

These weekend benchmarks of Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 19 updates can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within 1308106-SO-FEDORA19A18. That page also shows various information on the software/hardware, system logs, and the performance results in full. Below are a few excerpts.


Some Fedora 19 desktops using the open-source graphics drivers may find faster performance with the updates applied. The move to the Linux 3.10 kernel has the potential for some Radeon/Intel/Nouveau performance wins. From the start, Fedora 19 has shipped Mesa 9.2-devel so already there's been good "out of the box" performance on the Mesa/Gallium3D side.


Some computational tests are also running faster with the updated Fedora 19 x86_64 installation on the AMD A10-6800K APU.