Five Years Of Linux Kernel Benchmarks: 2.6.12 Through 2.6.37
Over the course of five years of Linux kernel development, the Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver application is running 9.5% faster on this virtualized setup running on an Intel Core i7 970.
The Blowfish performance with John The Ripper is up by 5.7% when comparing the Linux 2.6.12 and Linux 2.6.37 Git versions.
The LAME MP3 encoding performance went virtually unchanged.
The 7-Zip compression benchmark was particularly volatile to changes in the Linux kernel. With the Linux 2.6.12 kernel 7-Zip reported 17844 MIPS while it peaked in the Linux 2.6.23 release with 19376 MIPS and ended out at 17206 MIPS, with several vicissitudes to its performance along the way.