Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 Benchmarks Against RHEL 7.6, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, Clear Linux

Continuing on from the initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarks last week, now having had more time with this fresh enterprise Linux distribution, here are additional benchmarks on two Intel Xeon servers when benchmarking RHEL 8.0, RHEL 7.6, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and Clear Linux. RHEL 8.0 is certainly delivering much better out-of-the-box performance than its aging predecessor but how can it compete with Ubuntu LTS and Clear Linux?

As a reminder as to what is shipped by each of these Linux distributions, the core components include:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 - RHEL 7.6 uses a (heavily patched) Linux 3.10 kernel, GCC 4.8.5 compiler, and XFS file-system by default.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 - RHEL 8.0 runs with the Linux 4.18 kernel, GCC 8.2.1 compiler, and XFS file-system by default. There is a slew of updated packages compared to RHEL7 and what's available there, including other changes like changing over to Retpolines for the Spectre V2 mitigations.

Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS - This current Ubuntu LTS release with the HWE stack from 18.10 provides the Linux 4.18 kernel, GCC 7.4.0, and EXT4 file-system by default.

Clear Linux - Intel's rolling-release Linux distribution is effectively the gold standard for performance. Clear Linux as of testing was with the Linux 5.0 kernel, GCC 9.1.1 compiler, and EXT4 file-system.

More OS details in the automated system table:

These four Linux distributions were tested on two different Intel Xeon servers. For those wondering about AMD EPYC with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, my EPYC RHEL8 tests will be out later this week with even more Linux distributions vetted.

Tyan S7106 - This 1U Tyan Xeon Scalable server had two Intel Xeon Gold 6138 processors, 96GB of RAM, and Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD.

GIGABYTE MD61-SC2-00 - This 4U Xeon Scalable "Gigabyte Storage" server was tested with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascade Lake processors, 386GB of RAM, and Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD.

Both of these Xeon Scalable servers and four Linux distributions had their benchmarks facilitated in a fully-automated and standardized manner via the Phoronix Test Suite open-source software. If you want to see how your own Linux hardware compares to these two servers and four Linux distributions, simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1905108-HV-RHEL8XEON24.