Preview: Benchmarking CentOS 7.0 & Scientific Linux 7.0

CentOS 7.0 was released this week and that came just days after the first alpha of Scientific Linux 7, both of which are based upon last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. With these new community-based EL7 releases coming about, it's time for some fresh Enterprise Linux benchmarking and performance monitoring on Phoronix.

Going back months I have been trialling RHEL7 development releases and have been enjoying RHEL7 a lot with good performance results. Most of my time this week has been spent playing with CentOS 7.0 given its official status while both it and the still-rolling Scientific Linux 7.0 have been working great, which is largely a given as they're both derived from the same upstream code-base.

I'm very pleased with how Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 turned out and CentOS 7.0 / SL 7.0 are also great. In the weeks ahead I have many CentOS 7.0 (and Scientific Linux 7.0, once its officially released) tests planned in a variety of interesting situations to see how the performance has evolved of the EL releases and other Enterprise Linux computing scenarios.

In this article just for putting the initial CentOS/SL results into some perspective, I have some initial data from a single Intel Core i7 system running these new releases plus Fedora and Ubuntu Linux. Just as some initial metrics to get started with our benchmarking, from an Intel Core i7 4770K system with 8GB of RAM, 150GB Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD, and Intel HD Graphics 4600, I tested the four Linux distributions. The hardware and its settings were maintained the same during testing.

Originally for this first article I also hoped to test Scientific Linux / CentOS 6.5 too, but after doing the 7.0 tests and trying to boot the 6.5 releases, there was a kernel error preventing the testing from being realized (on initial boot was the i915 DRM error about detecting more than eight display outputs; when booting without DRM/KMS mode-setting support, there would be an agpgart error.) The i915 issue is corrected on future kernel revisions but for this system it was preventing the 6.5 releases from running nicely. From an older, more workstation focused system I will be running the new vs. old CentOS/SL releases.

The distribution configurations that were tested on the i7-4770K system was Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Fedora 20, Fedora 20 with all stable release updates as of 9 July, CentOS 7.0.1406, and Scientific Linux 7.0 Alpha. Besides having to leave out the CentOS/SL 6.5 releases due to the aforementioned kernel issue, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 final was left out over not having access at the moment to a supported/licensed build to use.