Initial Benchmarks Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 On An Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Server
Since yesterday's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 we have been busy firing up benchmarks of RHEL8 on multiple workstations and servers. Over the next week or two will be some interesting benchmark results on multiple systems compared to multiple operating systems while for some preliminary RHEL8 performance data are benchmarks of the new Red Hat Linux distribution from the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 "Cascade Lake" Gigabyte server compared to CentOS 7.6 (RHEL 7.6), Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora Server 29, Fedora Server 30, openSUSE Leap 15, and Clear Linux 29250.
Prior to the RHEL 8.0 GA announcement I had been working on some fresh Ubuntu 19.04 server and Fedora Server 30 benchmarks on this Cascade Lake server given their recent releases, so this article also offers a first glimpse of those new Linux distributions on this high-end Gigabyte Storage server. This server is equipped with dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors yielding a combined 56 cores / 112 threads, GIGABYTE MD61-SC2-00 motherboard, 384GB of DDR4-2933 ECC Registered memory, and Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD.
The upgrade from RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 (and other EL 7 based) Linux distributions to RHEL 8.0 is quite significant... It means going from a heavily-patched Linux 3.10 kernel now to using Linux 4.18, GNOME Shell 3.28.3 with Wayland provides the default desktop/workstation environment, XFS continues to be used as the default file-system, and GCC 8.2.1 has replaced GCC 4.8.5 as the default code compiler. The big kernel upgrade and several years worth of compiler improvements are big factors in enhancing the performance of RHEL 8.0, especially on modern Intel and AMD servers. Yes, the more thorough upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarks will also be looking at the AMD EPYC performance. Also helping performance with RHEL 8.0 is switching over to Retpolines by default as its preferred means of Spectre V2 mitigations and many other package upgrades.
Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were run from these tested RHEL / openSUSE / Ubuntu / Fedora Linux distributions.