CentOS 6 Through CentOS 8 Benchmarks On Intel Xeon

[phoronix]

Phoronix: CentOS 6 Through CentOS 8 Benchmarks On Intel Xeon

Complementing the CentOS 8 benchmarks I did following the release of that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 rebuild in late September, here are tests going back further for showing the performance of CentOS 6, CentOS 7, and CentOS 8 all benchmarked from the same Intel Xeon Scalable server. These tests were done about a month ago albeit with all the hardware launches, new child, and other factors, only now getting to posting the data.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28599

[Jumbotron]

What? New child? I missed that somewhere. Well...congratulations!! Ands thanks for all the hard work you do. Your workload just increased. But they're worth it. Here's to the Phoronix family increasing! 👍

[eva2000]

Thanks Michael as a CentOS user I appreciate this very much! Just need for missing EPEL 8 package and dependencies to catch up i.e. opendkim and cascading list of dependencies each developer is waiting on/relying on in order to build their respective EPEL 8 packages !

And for MariaDB.org folks to fix this bug

• https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-20673
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1780363

[trifud]

Unfortunately, the CentOS 8 GUI is very slow and unstable. At work we have several servers with CentOS 8 and RHEL8 running intensive GUI tests and GNOME crashes all the time. The lack of AMDGPU support on CentOS/RHEL8 is a big disappointment. To make matters worse, the AMD hybrid driver has a massive memory leak (at least on RHEL/CentOS 8) which makes it completely useless. I wouldn't recommend running this OS with GUI unless RHEL gets these issues fixed. But if you have to, use NVIDIA instead of AMD graphics.

BTW, does anybody know why RHEL decided to not support AMDGPU?

[torsionbar28]

Unfortunately, the CentOS 8 GUI is very slow and unstable. At work we have several servers with CentOS 8 and RHEL8 running intensive GUI tests and GNOME crashes all the time. The lack of AMDGPU support on CentOS/RHEL8 is a big disappointment. To make matters worse, the AMD hybrid driver has a massive memory leak (at least on RHEL/CentOS 8) which makes it completely useless. I wouldn't recommend running this OS with GUI unless RHEL gets these issues fixed. But if you have to, use NVIDIA instead of AMD graphics.

BTW, does anybody know why RHEL decided to not support AMDGPU?

Why bother with GUI on a server? We've got literally hundreds of RHEL 6, 7, and now 8 VM's running, and I don't think a single one of them has GUI installed. Just curious what kind of server use case needs a GUI...

[trifud]

We run CAD/CAM/CAE software on Linux (and it requires a GUI for the modelling part). It is 10-20% faster on Linux than on Windows. The RHEL/CentOS 8 GUI is giving us a lot of trouble. RHEL/CentOS 7 is rock solid. Performancewise, Debian and openSUSE are at the top. SLED is shaky too. For this type of application, we typically use rack mounted workstations, which is basically a server with GPU support. See for example https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop...0r-workstation

[torsionbar28]

We run CAD/CAM/CAE software on Linux (and it requires a GUI for the modelling part). It is 10-20% faster on Linux than on Windows. The RHEL/CentOS 8 GUI is giving us a lot of trouble. RHEL/CentOS 7 is rock solid. Performancewise, Debian and openSUSE are at the top. SLED is shaky too. For this type of application, we typically use rack mounted workstations, which is basically a server with GPU support. See for example https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop...0r-workstation

Interesting. I have to believe that the CAD/CAM/CAE software vendor has a published support matrix and best practices though right? That should identify the specific combinations of hardware, OS, drivers, etc. that they have validated and recommend for running their apps. I'm actually pretty surprised they support RHEL 8 already. We're going with RHEL 7 for a bunch of new machines we're standing up right now, because our server app vendor doesn't support RHEL 8 yet.

[trifud]

Interesting. I have to believe that the CAD/CAM/CAE software vendor has a published support matrix and best practices though right? That should identify the specific combinations of hardware, OS, drivers, etc. that they have validated and recommend for running their apps. I'm actually pretty surprised they support RHEL 8 already. We're going with RHEL 7 for a bunch of new machines we're standing up right now, because our server app vendor doesn't support RHEL 8 yet.

Yes, our software is supported on RHEL/CentOS 8.

[gilboa]

Unfortunately, the CentOS 8 GUI is very slow and unstable. At work we have several servers with CentOS 8 and RHEL8 running intensive GUI tests and GNOME crashes all the time. The lack of AMDGPU support on CentOS/RHEL8 is a big disappointment. To make matters worse, the AMD hybrid driver has a massive memory leak (at least on RHEL/CentOS 8) which makes it completely useless. I wouldn't recommend running this OS with GUI unless RHEL gets these issues fixed. But if you have to, use NVIDIA instead of AMD graphics.

BTW, does anybody know why RHEL decided to not support AMDGPU?

Sorry for coming late to the party.
Short answer: nVidia.
Long answer: If you are doing production work (especially CAD/CAM) on RHEL (or CentOS) and you live-being depends on it, get a mid-end (or high-end) Quadro card and be done with it.
As much as I like AMD GPUs, when its comes to 5-9s production work, they are simply not there. (I've got ~10 AMD GPU machines and >20 nVidia based machines)

- Gilboa