Oracle Linux 6.5 vs. Oracle Linux 7.0 Beta Benchmarks

Released earlier this month was the first beta of Oracle Linux 7.0, Oracle's spin of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 development source-code. With some days having passed we've now had the time to take Oracle Linux 7.0 Beta 1 for a test drive and see how the performance compares to Oracle Linux 6.5.

In the days ahead we will have benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS against Oracle Linux 6.5 and 7.0 Beta 1 along with CentOS 6.5 and the RHEL 7 release candidate among other enterprise-oriented Linux distributions. For this article to end out the weekend are just some benchmarks of Oracle Linux 6.5 vs. 7.0 Beta 1 when tested from the same hardware -- an Intel Core i7 3960X Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system with a total of 12 logical CPU threads.

Like upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Oracle Linux 7 is also using the GNOME Shell 3.8 desktop environment. XFS is also the default file-system in place of EXT4 from RHEL/Oracle Linux 6.

Similar to upstream RHEL7, Oracle Linux 7.0 Beta 1 is shipping with a RHEL7-compatible Linux 3.10 kernel, X.Org Server 1.15 RC1, Mesa 9.2.2, and the GCC 4.8.2 compiler.

With Oracle Linux 6.5 having GCC 4.4.7 by default, going to Oracle Linux 7 means a performance improvement for many built-from-source, performance-sensitive workloads thanks to the improvements within the GNU Compiler Collection in recent years.


The PostMark disk performance was slightly faster in Oracle Linux 7 using XFS over EXT4 in Oracle Linux 6.5.

GCC 4.8 is responsible for yielding most of the performance improvements out of this round of Oracle Linux 6.5 vs. 7.0 Beta 1 performance testing. While by default a Linux 3.10 EL7-compatible kernel is used, Oracle Linux 7.0 Beta 1 has a 3.8-based kernel that contains Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" patches.

See more of our early Oracle Linux 7.0 open-source benchmarks done via the Phoronix Test Suite at 1404208-KH-ORACLE76L05. Again, in the days ahead will be more thorough testing with multiple enterprise-grade Linux distributions. Have other test requests? Let us know via Phoronix on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter.