Early Linux 4.14 Kernel Benchmarks Are Looking Promising

I've begun running some Linux 4.14-rc1 kernel benchmarks and in some areas there appears to be nice gains with this in-development kernel.

If you are behind on your Phoronix reading and don't know about all of the changes coming for this next kernel release -- which will also be an LTS kernel -- see our Linux 4.14 feature overview that was published this past weekend.

Here are just some very early benchmarks while more are on the way.

First I ran some tests on the Core i9 7900X box with Linux 4.13.0 vs. 4.14-rc1...




Several I/O benchmarks showing better performance. There are EXT4 scalability improvements among other performance work for Linux 4.14 as outlined in our feature overview.



Dozens of other benchmarks from the i9-7900X box with Linux 4.14 can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. In a few other tests there were some small gains witnessed.

Also ran a few tests from the dual Xeon Gold Tyan 1U server...




There were some interesting swings there too. I'll have more Linux 4.14 kernel benchmarks in a more formal and thorough comparison soon.