Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS Performance Preview With Intel Xeon Scalable

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 29 March 2020 at 05:15 PM EDT. Page 2 of 9. 3 Comments.
Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS
Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS

For the most part the I/O performance hasn't changed much particularly if using one of the newer HWE stacks in the Ubuntu 18.04 point releases, but one notable exception is IO_uring. The new IO_uring interface has much promise for improving Linux I/O efficiency and still being adopted by more software projects. IO_uring was only introduced in Linux 5.1 and thus if you haven't used a HWE stack, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 is the first time you'll see it out-of-the-box on an Ubuntu LTS release.

Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS

In select cases we are finding Ubuntu 20.04 to offer up some network efficiency improvements over the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS series.

Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS
Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS
Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS
Xeon Cascade Lake R Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS

For those building software from source, Ubuntu 20.04 can offer some meaningful improvements for heavy computational workloads particularly with newer Intel/AMD/Arm CPUs. GCC 7 to GCC 9 alone is a big upgrade plus the newer Glibc, newer Open MPI, and countless other big version bumps over the past two years.

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