Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact Across Eight Linux Distributions

Hackbench as a Linux kernel scheduler benchmark saw the results vary quite a bit but generally the newer Linux distributions were faster and with less overhead compared to the likes of the enterprise-focused CentOS / RHEL and openSUSE Leap.

In the case of Perl, the fastest performance was with Ubuntu 18.094 LTS both for mitigated and unmitigated.

The Redis performance was most affected on RHEL8 Beta and openSUSE 15.0 but aside from that (and CentOS 7's slower performance) the other Linux distributions were delivering roughly similar performance.

Clear Linux and Fedora 29 were offering the fastest context switching performance.