Ubuntu 19.04 Is Offering Some Performance Improvements Over Ubuntu 18.10, Comparison To Clear Linux

With the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" release less than one month away, we are getting ready for rolling out more tests of this next six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux. For those curious about the direction of Ubuntu 19.04's performance, here are some very preliminary data points using the latest daily state of Ubuntu 19.04 right ahead of the beta period. Tests were done on a high-end Intel Core i9 9900K desktop as well as a Dell XPS Developer Edition notebook when comparing Ubuntu 19.04 to Ubuntu 18.10 and also tossing in Clear Linux as a performance reference point.

Ubuntu 19.04 is currently shipping with the Linux 5.0 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.32, X.Org Server 1.20.4, Mesa 19.0, and GCC 8.3.0 as some of the primary components. The usual upgrades to the latest kernel and Mesa can make a big difference for hardware support and performance if you are on one of the latest Intel/AMD platforms. Ubuntu 19.04 is sticking to GCC8 with GCC 9.1 having yet to be formally released and given the track record it's not until the xx.10 release when Ubuntu makes the big compiler upgrade.

Ubuntu 19.04 continues using the EXT4 file-system by default, no I/O scheduler for NVMe SSD storage, and one other upgrade worth mentioning for many developers is now having Python 3.7 (v3.7.2) rather than Python 3.6.

The two systems used for this "early look" at the Ubuntu 19.04 performance so far included:

Intel Core i9 9900K - An Intel Core i9 9900K with ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard, 16GB RAM, Samsung 970 EVO 256GB NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics.

Dell XPS 9370 - The Dell XPS Developer Edition with Intel Core i7 8550U, 8GB RAM, Samsung 256GB NVMe SSD, and Intel UHD Graphics 620.

Obviously when the official Ubuntu 19.04 release is near in April, we'll be back with plenty more benchmarks on a multitude of systems, the results today are just a preliminary gauge of where the Disco Dingo appears to be heading. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of benchmarks were carried out.