How Ubuntu 16.10 With Linux 4.8/4.9 Compares To Early 3.x Kernels

When having out the Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" HP EliteBook this weekend besides comparing fresh OpenGL numbers to early Sandy Bridge results going back to 2012, I also compared Ubuntu 16.10 / Linux 4.8 and Linux 4.9 compared to older kernel benchmarks I did with the same system.

I am in the process of doing a fresh Linux 3.x/4.x kernel comparison from a Core i7 4790K Haswell system, but separately, this weekend with having pulled out the Sandy Bridge laptop I compared the fresh benchmarks to some of my older results on this hardware.

A couple years back I had done Linux 3.3 through Linux 3.3 kernel benchmarks on this Sandy Bridge notebook atop Ubuntu 13.10. With having the laptop out now and loading Ubuntu 16.10 to it, I compared te modern Linux performance figures to it plus also loaded on Linux 4.9 Git for a secondary run. Thus some fun weekend benchmarks of some old Linux results to modern-day Linux on the same Core i5 5250M notebook.


The EXT4 file-system performance on the SSD looks like it may have increased a bit since Linux 3.3 on Ubuntu 13.10.

In some tests like PostMark the results are more profound, but that may also be attributed to the newer GCC compiler on Ubuntu 16.10, so take these results as you wish.


Other tests show only minor to minimal performance change.


But looks like there may be some regressions on this Sandy Bridge laptop in going from the 13.10 to 16.10 base, namely GCC regressions likely for this particular slowdown.


Well, those were just some extra numbers to toss out this weekend while running this old Sandy Bridge laptop. Stay tuned for my fresh Linux 3.x/4.x kernel benchmarks from the same Haswell system and all from the same base OS (Ubuntu 16.10) with those tests still ongoing. Those formal results should be featured on Phoronix in the next few days.