Benchmarks Of Linux 4.14 On The Raspberry Pi

This week Raspbian OS, the official Debian-based operating system of the Raspberry Pi, finally upgraded to the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel. Considering that Raspbian was previously on Linux 4.9, it's quite the kernel upgrade, and I decided to run some before/after benchmarks.

Going from Linux 4.9 to 4.14 means the Raspbian maintainers need to carry less out-of-tree patches for the Raspberry Pi since in this timeframe more of their work has been upstreamed to the Linux kernel. Plus there's been a whole array of improvements to the mainline Linux kernel in this timeframe. Some users have been hopeful of performance improvements being part of that, so I decided to run some improvements.

I ran some benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ of Linux 4.9 vs. 4.14 on Raspbian.

And we were off to the races with Linux benchmarks...








In a few tests there was faintly better performance, but after running dozens of benchmarks the past day on these Raspberry Pi boards between these major Linux kernel revisions, I have yet to find any workload having a significant performance impact -- for better or worse.