Power & Performance Tests With Fedora 24 Beta, Linux 4.6 Kernel

For those that have been requesting some fresh benchmarks looking at the system power consumption / efficiency of modern Linux distributions/kernels and how they're working out for laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks on two Intel devices when comparing Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 Beta and also testing out the power performance with the Linux 4.6 kernel.

This article has various performance benchmarks along with battery power consumption figures that were automatically logged via the Phoronix Test Suite during the benchmarking process. Based upon available modern hardware, I had just two laptops to use for this comparison today. First was a Haswell-based ASUS UX301LAA ultrabook.

Secondly, was a Broadwell-based Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

Each system was tested with Fedora 23 out-of-the-box, Fedora 23 with all available system updates as of this week, Fedora 24 Beta, and Fedora 24 in its development state upgraded to the Linux 4.6 Rawhide NoDebug kernel.

The Phoronix Test Suite ran a variety of benchmarks while monitoring the battery power usage, but first up are the figures when the two devices were idling at the GNOME desktop in the four configurations.

The X1 Carbon while idling saw a slightly lower power draw when idling with Fedora 24 Beta compared to Fedora 23 out-of-the-box, but Fedora 23 with all available stable release updates had the best numbers. For this X1 Carbon notebook, there wasn't any real change in the numbers between Fedora 24 Beta with Linux 4.5 and trying out Linux 4.6-rc7.

When measuring the battery power usage while idling on the ASUS Zenbook, Fedora 24 Beta was the worst off with it keeping busy at a higher power consumption rate and also having issues with dimming the screen while idling, which is why its power numbers didn't drop after a short time. However, when moving to the Linux 4.6 Rawhide NoDebug kernel on Fedora 24, its idling power numbers were the best yet. The low/average/max were all at their best when using the Linux 4.6 kernel for this Haswell Core i7 portable.

Let's look at some power and performance numbers under some different workloads now...