Ubuntu 15.10 vs. Fedora 23 With The Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake

A few days ago I wrote about building an Intel Skylake Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" system and my experiences under Ubuntu. Here's a few notes about this Xeon E3 1245 v5 system when trying Fedora 23 Linux, along with some comparative performance benchmarks.

With Ubuntu 15.10 out-of-the-box there were some display issues with the Skylake WKS GT2 graphics not being properly supported. With a clean install of Fedora 23, I didn't run into this issue since it didn't even support the Skylake graphics by default with its 4.2-based kernel. When installing all of the Fedora 23 stable updates, it's still on Linux 4.2 and thus didn't handle the Intel HD Graphics P530 of this Xeon processor.

Not 4K... And rendered via LLVMpipe.

However, once installing the Fedora Rawhide Nodebug kernel that is currently based on the Linux 4.4-rc5 kernel, the graphics were working out fine.

I ran some reference benchmarks on this Xeon E3 1245 v5 system comparing Ubuntu 15.10 and Fedora 23 in their updated forms. Prior to the 4.4 kernel switch, this CPU was still using the ACPI CPUfreq scaling governor on Fedora rather than Intel's P-State.
Only in a few benchmarks were there any performance difference between Ubuntu and Fedora with this brand new system. You can see all of the performance data via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.