Debian 11 Performance Uplift Is Looking Great For Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC

This past weekend marked the release of Debian 11 "Bullseye" as the newest version of this major Linux distribution that is also the basis for many others. Given the popularity of Debian stable on servers, our first round of Debian 11.0 benchmarking is looking at the performance relative to Debian 10.10 on latest-generation Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC "Milan" hardware.

As Debian 11 incorporates the latest upstream software releases over the past two years, it should be little surprise but it makes for often sizable performance uplift when migrating to new releases, especially if you are running newer hardware.

In the case of moving from Debian 10 to Debian 11, it means going from Linux 4.19 to 5.10 LTS, GCC 8.3 to GCC 10.2, Python 3.7 to Python 3.9, and many other significant updates. The Linux kernel from 4.19 to 5.10 has seen many big additions for new software features, in the case of AMD CPUs meaning the default CPUFreq change from ondemand to schedutil, and better supporting the newer hardware such as the Xeon Ice Lake and EPYC Milan servers being benchmarked for this initial round of Debian 11 performance testing.

On AMD EPYC 7763 2P and Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 2P servers, Debian 10.10 and Debian 11.0 were benchmarked in their out-of-the-box/default configurations on these two servers for seeing how the performance differs (largely improving) across the span of more than 70 different tests. Benchmarks of Debian 11 against other modern Linux distributions are coming up soon on Phoronix.