Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta Performance Looks Great - Initial RHEL 9 vs. RHEL 10 Benchmarks On AMD EPYC Turin

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 now in public beta this month, I have begun testing out the RHEL 10 beta on a few systems in the lab. In this first look at RHEL 10 performance is seeing how well the RHEL 10 beta is performing relative to RHEL 9.5 stable on an AMD EPYC server.

In my testing of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 beta the past few days it has been working out very well thus far. RHEL 10.0 is gearing up for its stable release in Q2'2025 (presumably will be timed for around the Red Hat Summit in May) as a big update to this enterprise Linux distribution with three years of additions since the RHEL 9.0 debut back in May 2022.

With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 Beta release it's on the Linux 6.11 kernel (though CentOS Stream 10 has moved to Linux 6.12 LTS), GCC 14.2 is the default compiler, XFS remains the default file-system, and there is a wealth of other package updates like moving to Python 3.12 by default and OpenJDK Java 21 as its default version. RHEL 10 also goes Wayland-only (with XWayland support retained) for the GNOME Shell desktop stack.

Particularly for newer hardware, RHEL 10 can mean a big deal due to the much newer kernel as well as the compiler/toolchain defaults. Going from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 beta means going from a Linux 5.14 kernel with heavy back-ports to Linux 6.11 and also jumping from GCC 11.5 to GCC 14.2 with a lot of improvements there. In this article is a comparison when carrying out clean installs and out-of-the-box performance for RHEL 9.5 and RHEL 10.0 beta on the same hardware.

The server build for thos RHEL 9 and RHEL 10.0 beta performance benchmarking was a Supermicro H13SSL-N 4U 1P server build with AMD EPYC 9655 processor, 12 x 64GB DDR5-6000 Micron memory, 2TB Solidigm P41 Plus (SSDPFKNU020TZ) NVMe SSD, and SilverStone XE360-SP5 cooling.

Let's see with this first look at RHEL 10 performance what it can deliver over RHEL 9 for this modern AMD EPYC server platform. Tests on other servers with RHEL 10 beta as well as alternatives like CentOS Stream 10 and AlmaLinux 10 beta to come in follow-up articles on Phoronix.