Early Benchmarks Of The Linux 3.14 Kernel

Now that most of "the scary stuff" for Linux 3.14 has been taken care of, it's time to benchmark this next major kernel release. The Linux 3.14 kernel has many major features added so there's plenty of benchmarks abound while in this article is a comparison of the 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14 Git kernels from an Intel Ultrabook.

For this first round of Linux 3.14 development benchmarks were tests comparing the Git state to the mainline/vanilla 3.12 and 3.13 kernels with default options when running on an ASUS Zenbook Prime Intel "Ivy Bridge" Ultrabook. The Zenbook Prime has an Intel Core i7 3517U processor with HD Graphics 4000, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and dual 128GB SanDisk SD55F212 SSDs (only one drive was used for this round of testing).

Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 was running on this Intel Ultrabook while using Mesa 10.0.1, GCC 4.8.2, Unity 7.1.2, and swapping between the Linux 3.12 / 3.13 / 3.14 Git kernels using the Ubuntu mainline kernel repository.

All of this Linux kernel benchmarking was done via the Phoronix Test Suite for reliable and repeatable test automation using our cross-platform open-source benchmarking stack. On the following pages are the initial 3.14 kernel results spanning multiple subsystems while in the days to come will be benchmarks looking more closely at the different areas the kernel has evolved in Linux 3.14.