Preview: Benchmarking CentOS 7.0 & Scientific Linux 7.0

Interestingly, EL 7.0 is using the Intel P-State driver in place of ACPI CPUfreq for the CPU frequency scaling for the Core i7 Haswell CPU. The i7-4770K system defaulted to using Intel P-State with the powersave governor whereas Ubuntu 14.04 LTS uses ACPI CPUfreq ondemand as did Fedora 20 in its stock state. (These driver differences is also why the CPU frequency is reported differently on the automated system table above; base vs. Turbo frequency reporting). You can see some ACPI CPUfreq vs. Intel P-State benchmarks in an earlier Phoronix article.

Both CentOS and Scientific Linux are currently shipping with the Linux 3.10.0-123.4.2.el7.x86_64 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.8.4, X.Org Server 1.15.0, Mesa 9.2.5, and GCC 4.8.2. As with RHEL 7.0, the XFS file-system is used by default but you can easily opt to another file-system. EL 7.0 distributions defaulted to the CFQ I/O scheduler.

For those looking to carry out their own Enterprise Linux 7.0 benchmarks or any other Linux benchmarks for that matter, the Phoronix Test Suite fully supports all of these latest Linux distribution releases. With the Phoronix Test Suite users are able to carry out fully-automated, reproducible, and turn-key deployed benchmarks using a fully open-source software stack. With OpenBenchmarking.org are also increased collaboration possibilities. With all of that said, on the following pages are our initial CentOS 7.0 and Scientific Linux 7.0 performance benchmarks.