Fedora 23/24 vs. Debian vs. Ubuntu 16.04 vs. CentOS 7 vs. Clear Linux Tests

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 6 April 2016 at 09:45 PM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 17 Comments.

For some extra benchmarks to toss out there tonight are some tests of Fedora 23 and Fedora 24 Alpha (while acknowledging it's still early in development and debug mode) compared to Debian testing, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in its current development form, Intel Clear Linux, and CentOS 7.

This comparison isn't nearly as exhaustive or interesting as last month's 15-way Linux OS distribution comparison with a ton of interesting tests and all the big player distributions in a head-to-head showdown on the same system. Today are just the results from some tests I did on an Intel Xeon Skylake system that started off when being curious how the new Fedora 24 Alpha that's looking really great compares to other modern distributions.

The tested configurations were:

Fedora 23 - Stock Fedora 23 with the Linux 4.2 kernel, Mesa 11.0.3, and GCC 5.3.1

Fedora 23 + Updates - All stable release updates on Fedora 23 Linux as of the testing time, which brought it to Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.1.

Fedora 24 Alpha - The Linux 4.5 kernel, Mesa 11.2-dev, and GCC 6.0.0.

Debian Testing - Linux 4.4, Mesa 11.1.2, and GCC 5.3.1.

Ubuntu 16.04 - Linux 4.4, Mesa 11.1.2, GCC 5.3.1.

Intel Clear Linux 7160 - Linux 4.5, GCC 5.3.0. Clear Linux defaults to the CPUFreq scaling driver where as all other distributions with this processor were using P-State.

CentOS 7 - Linux 3.10, Mesa 10.6.5, and GCC 4.8.5. All other distributions were defaulting to EXT4 where as CentOS/EL7 defaults to XFS.

All of these Linux distributions were tested on the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system (3.7GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz turbo), 16GB DDR4 memory, MSI C236A Workstation, and a Radeon R9 290 graphics card.

More system software/hardware details here:

The tests for this brief comparison were all facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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