Linux 4.1 Through Linux 4.5 Kernel Benchmarks On An Intel Xeon E3 v5

First up with SQLite, we see a regression in performance going from Linux 4.2 to Linux 4.3 and it's been that way since. One item worth pointing out is that prior to Linux 4.3, this system was using the CPUFreq scaling driver while since then the Xeon Skylake has been defaulting to the P-State scaling driver. At the end of this article are a few CPU scaling driver/governor comparisons to see if that's the cause for the performance slowdown on the newer kernels.

With the OpenArena game, since Linux 4.3 the performance is indeed lower... Linux 4.5 is in fact the slowest of the kernels tested for this Radeon R7 370 graphics card on RadeonSI.

Tesseract is another case where the best results are found with Linux 4.1~4.2 and since then the performance is only lower.

With Unigine Valley there was no measurable change in performance.