Linux 3.17 To Linux 4.16 Kernel Benchmarks On Intel Gulftown & Haswell Hardware

With the Stress-NG socket activity benchmark, the i7-5960X is slightly faster with 4.16 but still not nearly close to its 4.14.0 and prior kernel versions.

The context switching performance is slightly better with Linux 4.16 on both tested systems.

Apache has continued sliding lower, at least in this single-threaded AB test case.

And the Hackbench results don't see much change going from Linux 4.15 to 4.16 for this kernel scheduler benchmark.

Overall we haven't seen any broad performance changes in Linux 4.16.0 for better or worse except for in some specific drivers like the ongoing improvements to the AMDGPU DRM driver. See our Linux 4.16 feature overview to learn more about this soon-to-be-stable kernel update and I'll keep testing this Linux Git kernel on more systems looking for any notable changes.