Linux 4.19 Kernel Benchmarks On The Raspberry Pi

With the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently having begun rolling out a Linux 4.19-based kernel to Raspberry Pi boards, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of two Raspberry Pi systems with the new Linux 4.19 kernel compared to its previous 4.14 kernel.

The upgrade from Linux 4.14 to 4.19 is quite a significant jump and users can switch over to this new kernel release by firing off raspi-upgrade. On a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, I ran benchmarks before/after the kernel upgrade for seeing how this new kernel changes the performance.

A heck of a lot of upstream improvements happened in the span of Linux 4.14 to 4.19 and for Raspberry Pi boards it also means more of the code was mainlined in this time so there are less out-of-tree patches being carried against this new kernel. Using the Phoronix Test Suite I ran a variety of benchmarks for checking out the performance impact. The same Raspbian installations were maintained throughout testing with the only change being the kernel upgrades on each ARM board.