Fedora 38 Beta Performance Mostly Flat, Few Regressions

For those curious how the performance of Fedora 38 is looking ahead of its official release at the end of April, here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at the performance of this leading-edge Linux distribution as of the Fedora 38 Beta milestone last week. On both Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X "Zen 4" desktop systems, the Fedora 37 performance was compared to that of Fedora 38 Beta.

With Fedora shipping new Linux kernel versions down as stable release updates to existing distribution releases and a more liberal update policy in general, going from the current Fedora stable release to the next doesn't tend to be as major performance-wise as some distributions like Ubuntu that will stick to an older kernel version for its duration. In the case of Fedora 37 as of testing was already on Linux 6.1 while its 6.2 roll-out should be soon, similar to Fedora 38 beta on Linux 6.2.

As of testing last week, jumping from Fedora 37 to Fedora 38 beta with clean installs meant going from Linux 6.1 to 6.2, Mesa 22.3.7 to Mesa 23.0.0, GNOME 43 to GNOME 44, and most significant from the benchmarking perspective is the GNU toolchain upgrade with going from GCC 12.2 to GCC 13.0. Plus there is an assortment of other package updates to find with Fedora 38, those are just some of the key versions worth mentioning.

The updated Fedora 37 install and Fedora 38 Beta releases were cleanly installed and tested on two similar high-end desktop systems from AMD and Intel, based around the Ryzen 9 7950X and Core i9 13900K respectively. No hardware changes obviously between the new/old Fedora but simply looking at the Fedora 38 performance on these two distinct desktops.

For the most part it was smooth sailing but a few benchmarks worth mentioning in looking at the Fedora 38 performance ahead of its official release in April.