Linux 3.5 To Linux 4.5-rc1 Kernel Benchmarks

Last week I carried out tests of the Linux 3.5 through Linux 4.4 kernels. Those benchmarks were fairly interesting in looking at the evolution of the Linux kernel performance over the past three and a half years. With Linux 4.5-rc1 now out, here are benchmarks with this latest kernel version that's currently under development.

Following the 3.5 through 4.4 kernel benchmarking, I kept the system in its same state while waiting for the Linux 4.5 merge window to end. Now that it's out the door and Linux 4.5 brings many new features, I've been benchmarking Linux 4.5-rc1 on this system to add to the comparison. Those results are now available.

As a reminder, the tests were done on a Xeon E5-2687W v3 Haswell processor (10 cores plus Hyper Threading), MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard, 16GB of DDR4 memory, a PNY CS121 120GB solid-state drive, and AMD FirePro V7900 (Cayman) graphics card. Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 was the base operating system with Mesa 11.0.8 and GCC 5.3.1 and an EXT4 file-system while swapping out all of the tested kernel versions.

All of these Linux kernel benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. All kernels were obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.