CentOS 6 Through CentOS 8 Benchmarks On Intel Xeon Server

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.

These benchmarks are of CentOS 6, CentOS 7, and CentOS 8 with all available stable release updates for each as of early November (prior to TAA, JCC Erratum, and other more recent disclosures). This was done to look at how the performance of these CentOS releases compare that track RHEL6, RHEL7, and RHEL8 respectively. Additionally, for each operating system was also a secondary run when booted with mitigations disabled to also provide a look at the CentOS Linux performance with the various CPU security mitigations disabled.

Aside from the run with mitigations disabled, each CentOS installation was done default/out-of-the-box with the standard settings in place. The same server was used throughout all testing which was a dual Xeon Gold 6138 Skylake-SP server in order to have compatibility going back to CentOS 6.10.

This is quite a straight-forward comparison driven out of curiosity sake so let's get right to these numbers via the Phoronix Test Suite.