An Early Look At Debian 9.0 Performance vs. Debian 8.8, Ubuntu 17.04, CentOS 7, Clear Linux

With Debian 9.0 "Stretch" being released in a few weeks, you can expect to find a number of Debian GNU/Linux comparisons coming up on Phoronix in June. For those curious how the performance of Debian Stretch is looking now that it's nearly finalized, here are some initial benchmarks compared to the current stable Debian 8.8 release as well as Ubuntu 17.04, CentOS 7, and Clear Linux.

Debian 9.0 has settled on the Linux 4.9 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.22 desktop by default, X.Org Server 1.19.2, Mesa 13.0.6 (yes, sadly not Mesa 17.0 or 17.1), GCC 6.3.0 and is using an EXT4 file-system by default. With Debian 9 is also the switch from ACPI CPUFreq to P-State for CPU frequency scaling on newer Intel hardware, which is why the CPU frequency of this Skylake test system is reflected differently between them on the system table.

The same Intel Core i5 6600K system was used throughout the entire testing process across Ubuntu 8.8, Debian 9.0 Testing, CentOS 7, Intel Clear Linux rolling, and Ubuntu 17.04. All of the benchmarks on each operating system were facilitated in a fully-automated and standardized manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

Let's see how the current Debian 9 performance is looking compared to other Linux distributions. Of course, once out, you can expect a broader Linux distribution comparison.