Benchmarks Of The OpenSUSE Leap Kernel Flavors

Last week I posted the benchmarks of a six-way Linux distribution comparison that included Fedora, openSUSE, Manjaro, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint Linux. One of the test requests that came out of it was posting some follow-up benchmarks of the different openSUSE Linux kernel options. In this article are benchmarks of openSUSE's four main kernel flavors.

Those unfamiliar with the openSUSE kernel flavors can see this Wiki page. Tested for this article was the default, desktop, debug, and vanilla kernel options. During testing, installed by default was the -desktop kernel when installing the openSUSE 42.1 Leap Beta and thus that was what ended up being used in last week's Linux distribution comparison, although the Wiki page indicates that the -default kernel should be the default for desktops and servers. The 4.1.6-10 kernel was used when testing the -debug, -default, -desktop, and -vanilla kernel images obtained from the official openSUSE Leap repository.

Tested with each of these openSUSE kernel flavors were various graphics, disk, and CPU benchmarks. All of the tests were conducted in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

On the following pages are the results from this clean install of openSUSE Leap Beta and then testing these four official kernel flavors. Tests were done on the same Intel Haswell Xeon + AMD FirePro system as used in last week's cross-distribution comparison.