Intel Skylake Tests On Linux 4.3 Bring A Few Changes

Most of the CPU workloads seem untouched by Linux 4.3.

Causing some concern is that it seems the PostgreSQL performance is noticeably lower on Linux 4.3 for both the on-disk and buffer tests when carrying out pgbench with normal load in its read/write mode.

The Redis GET performance was also lower on Linux 4.3 while the set performance was unchanged.

Overall, these Linux 4.3 Skylake test results are largely uninteresting with no major performance changes to be found. However, the Redis and PostgreSQL regressions may cause some concern. I'll be running the tests on some other systems to see if it's something Skylake-specific (or otherwise system related) or a broader regression. There's also other tests on Ubuntu and Fedora being done daily of the latest Linux kernel Git code over at LinuxBenchmarking.org.

While the performance may be mostly flat for Skylake on Linux 4.3, at least there's a lot of new functionality for this kernel that will be released as stable in the next few weeks.