Initial Benchmarks Of CentOS 8.0 & CentOS Stream On Intel Xeon / AMD EPYC

With this week's release of the much anticipated CentOS 8.0 as the community/free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as well as the surprise announcement of the bleeding-edge, rolling-release CentOS Stream, we have begun benchmarking these enterprise Linux distribution releases. Up today are our first tests of CentOS 7.7 against CentOS 8.0 and the early CentOS Stream state on Intel Xeon Cascadelake and AMD EPYC Rome servers.

This is just the first of our CentOS 8.0 benchmarks over the past few days with more performance tests being worked on, including a cross-distribution comparison of the enterprise Linux x86_64 distributions and more. But for ending out the week, here is an initial look at the CentOS 8.0 performance for those that may be using the weekend downtime for upgrading from CentOS 7.

My experiences with CentOS 8.0 over the past few days were overall good and just like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 experience when it was released back in May. CentOS 8.0 was working well on both the Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server used for our ongoing Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" testing as well as the AMD Daytona reference platform for our EPYC 7002 Rome series benchmarking. Not only was the setup experience pleasant, but just the RHEL7 to RHEL8 transition, moving to CentOS 8.0 generally means big performance gains thanks to all the package updates and improvements over the past several years.

This initial round of testing on the Gigabyte server and AMD EPYC Rome reference servers were with the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 and AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs, respectively, in a dual-socket configuration.

At this point with CentOS Stream having just been announced, it's not too different from CentOS 8.0. The key package versions are all basically the same with CentOS 8.0 at this point but worth highlighting and accounting for some performance change is a newer version of the EL8 Linux 4.18 kernel with its various back-ports and changes. Aside from that, it's a near facsimile of CentOS 8.0 but with time will certainly diverge more as we get further past the RHEL 8.0 launch.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite, various benchmarks were run on these two servers across CentOS 7.7/8.0/Stream. Stay tuned for more enterprise Linux distribution benchmarks next week.