Benchmarking OpenMandriva's AMD Ryzen Optimized Linux Distribution On The Threadripper 3970X

While Clear Linux is well known as being the performance-optimized Linux distribution out of Intel and catered towards performing the best on their hardware (though as we continue to show, Clear Linux does also perform incredibly well on AMD hardware too and generally faster than other distributions), when it comes to AMD-optimized distributions the primary example remains OpenMandriva. Since 2018 OpenMandriva has been providing an AMD Zen optimized build where their operating system and entire package archive is built with the "znver1" compiler optimizations. As it's been almost a year since last looking at OpenMandriva's Zen optimized build, here are some fresh benchmarks using the newly-released OpenMandriva 4.1.

OpenMandriva works on this Zen-optimized build without the support of AMD but simply for trying to offer a more performant experience given the increasing number of their users with AMD Ryzen processors. This "Znver1" optimized spin of OpenMandriva's ISOs and entire package archive is offered as a separate option from the conventional OpenMandriva x86_64 builds.

Unlike Clear Linux that relentlessly optimizes their platform with various patches, plenty of compiler options, and other painstaking efforts thanks to the broad resources of Intel, OpenMandriva's Zen optimized version is principally set on building all their software with "-march=znver1" for supporting Zen 1 processors and newer.

Off the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X with ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME motherboard, 4 x 16GB DDR4-3600 memory, Radeon VII graphics, and Corsair 1TB Force MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD drive, benchmarks were carried out of the new OpenMandriva Lx 4.1. Both the conventional OpenMandriva x86_64 build was tested and their Znver1 version. Fresh installs were made of both. Those OpenMandriva results were compared to our recent Linux distribution vs. Windows comparison on this Threadripper 3970X system.

Following those Linux/Windows comparison figures are also some more standalone benchmarks looking at the OpenMandriva x86_64 vs. Znver1 build performance. Additionally, from the Znver1 build was a third set of results when switching to their LLVM Clang built kernel. OpenMandriva is one of the few Linux distributions using LLVM Clang as their default code compiler rather than GCC, but their stock kernel is still built with GCC. But new to OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is also a Clang-built kernel package, so that was tested as a third data point.

All of these benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.