6-Way Linux Distribution Comparison On AMD's Ryzen

Given AMD's Ryzen is a very new platform, some Phoronix readers have inquired whether a given distribution is a faster and better-supported than others. Here are tests of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Debian, Antergos, Fedora, and openSUSE tested with an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X system.

I've previously covered AMD Ryzen from the kernel perspective and how Linux 4.10 is ideal or a later Linux 4.9 point release. But when it comes to motherboards, Linux 4.11 is needed for many if using the Realtek ALC1220 codec. I've commented more on Ryzen Linux compatibility back in my Ryzen 7 1800X Linux review.

The distributions installed and tested were Ubuntu 17.04 daily, Clear Linux 13910, Debian 9.0 Testing, Antergos 17.3, Fedora 25, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. The only new issue with those distributions tested was under Fedora 25, when upgrading with all stable updates, the system was unbootable as the UEFI configuration disappeared -- something I haven't seen happen on other F25 systems nor with the other distributions tested on this same system. When reinstalling F25 and keeping the stock packages, the system ran without any problems. Another distribution attempted for testing was CentOS 7 (1611), but the system was hanging during the boot process, thus wasn't tested for this article.

The hardware used for this testing process included the Ryzen 7 1800X, MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4 memory, Radeon RX 480, and 256GB Intel 600p NVMe SSD. On the following pages are the out-of-the-box benchmarks on the six tested distributions using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.