XanMod-ing Ubuntu To Perform Closer To Intel's Clear Linux

Earlier this month many Phoronix readers were interested in our fresh tests of the XanMod-patched Linux kernel for boosting the desktop and workstation performance compared to Ubuntu's default Linux kernel. Among many patches, XanMod does pull in some kernel patches from Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux, so we figured it would be interesting to see how the XanMod'ed Ubuntu compares to Clear Linux performance.

As covered more in the earlier article, the XanMod Linux kernel flavor makes use of the BFQ I/O scheduler, offers CPU scaling governor improvements, makes use of preemptive full tickless kernel settings, and has a variety of other patches from leveraging Clear Linux optimizations to the BMQ process scheduler to the Proton FSYNC patches to much more. This round of testing was using a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with its current Linux 5.4 default kernel and then re-tested using the same Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installation but running on the 4.1.10-xanmod6 kernel at the time. Additionally, the same CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS as Clear Linux defaults to were also utilized.

Clear Linux was then tested as of its Clear Linux OS 32050 build with the Linux 5.4 kernel and other default packages.

All of this testing of Ubuntu 20.04 vs. Ubuntu 20.04 + XanMod vs. Clear Linux 23050 was done with the Intel Core i9 10980XE Cascadelake-X system with 32GB of RAM, Gigabyte X299X DESIGNARE motherboard, Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were carried out.