Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. openSUSE vs. Clear Linux On Intel Kabylake

After running my initial Intel Kaby Lake Linux tests last week using a Core i5 MSI Cubi 2 with new "KBL" processor, which was done under Ubuntu 16.10, I turned my focus to testing a few other distributions with this newest-generation Intel processor.

The MSI Cubi 2 with Core i5 7200U was tested also with the Fedora 25 latest release candidate, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. On all of these latest Linux distributions, the MSI Cubi 2 / Intel Kaby Lake didn't run into any issues to speak of! Great to see KabyLake support in good shape already on Linux for these mobile processors, so with the desktop launch ahead hopefully there won't be any issues. The main concern always with Intel CPU Linux support comes to the open-source graphics stack and there everything appears to be nailed down.

For those curious, I did run some performance benchmarks on this KabyLake system using Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and Clear Linux using the Phoronix Test Suite.



The new HD Graphics 620 performance tended to be the best on Ubuntu 16.10 and Intel's own Clear Linux rolling-release distribution.




CPU results tended to vary a bit, but overall were performing strong.

Ubuntu 16.10 and Intel Clear Linux tended to run neck-and-neck. Clear Linux out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center ships with many aggressive optimizations and other defaults in the name of delivering the best Intel Linux performance.


Those interested can find more results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. For those just interested in graphics, last week were more HD Graphics 620 Linux benchmarks.