Debian 6.0 Through Debian 9.0 Benchmarks

Continuing in our benchmarks of Debian 9, here is a comparison when re-testing 6.0.10 "Squeeze", Debian 7.11 "Wheezy", Debian 8.8 "Jessie", and the newly-released Debian 9.0 "Stretch".

The same Intel Core i5 2500K "Sandy Bridge" system was used for this Debian 6 through Debian 9 benchmarking process for being able to go back far into Debian's history and still be able to run on the bare metal hardware. This i5-2500K system was equipped with 4GB of RAM, 120GB SanDisk SATA 3.0 SSD, and Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. The same system and its configuration was maintained the same throughout the entire benchmarking process; any reported differences on the system table come down to Linux reporting differences between releases.

Debian 6.0 is as far as we were able to go back, and even then wasn't able to run with the X.Org Server on this system. Debian 6.0.10 has the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GCC 4.4.5, and used EXT3 by default. Debian 6.0 debuted in February 2011.

Debian 7.11 was up next and it had the Linux 4.2 kernel, GCC 4.7.2 compiler, GNOME Shell 3.4.2, X.Org Server 1.12.4, and Mesa 8.0.5. This was also the release where Debian transitioned to using an EXT4 file-system by default, which they continue to do through Debian 9.

Debian 8.8 meanwhile has the Linux 3.16 kernel, GCC 4.9.2, GNOME Shell 3.14.4, X.Org Server 1.16.4, and Mesa 10.3.2. It's with Debian 8 where the Intel CPU transition happened from the ACPI CPUFreq scaling governor to Intel P-State.

Lastly, Debian 9.0 shipped last week with the Linux 4.9 kernel, GCC 6.3.0, GNOME Shell 3.22.3, X.Org Server 1.19.2, and Mesa 13.0.6.

From Debian 6 through Debian 9.0, all benchmarks were conducted in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.