Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 Beta Benchmarks

With this week's release of Fedora 20 Beta, I have carried out some benchmarks comparing the performance of Fedora 19 to this latest development release.

Due to Fedora 20 development releases shipping with debug symbols and other non-release-ready code, the tests today were limited to just giving a quick overview of the performance differences between Fedora 20 Beta and Fedora 19. Fedora 19 was tested in both its stock configuration and then installing all available updates. For ruling out some of the performance issues on Fedora 20 Beta due to the debug state, "slub_debug=-" was set as one of the kernel command-line parameters.

Fedora 19 shipped with the Linux 3.9 kernel by default and Mesa 9.2.0-devel, but stable F19 updates has brought it up to the Linux 3.11 kernel and Mesa 9.2.0 stable. The Fedora Linux update policies tend to be more liberal than Ubuntu and other distributions to allow new versions of packages to arrive post-release. Between the updated Fedora 19 stack and Fedora 20 Beta there were just slightly different versions of the 3.11 kernel, GNOME 3.8.4 vs. 3.10.1, xf86-video-ati 7.1.99 vs. 7.2.99, and other small changes.

All testing happened from an AMD Opteron 2384 system with a Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards, 4GB of RAM, and a 64GB OCZ Agility EX SSD. All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite.