AMD EPYC Milan Performance Across 11 Different 2021 Linux Distributions

After looking recently at the FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" using a Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server, the next round of benchmarking from this server with AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor was looking at its support (all tested 2021 Linux distributions were running fine on this latest-generation AMD server) and performance across 11 current Linux distribution releases from Arch, CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

From the Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server (Tyan S8036GM2NE motherboard) with AMD EPYC 7543 processor, a variety of different Linux distributions were benchmarked including:

- Arch Linux
- CentOS Stream
- Clear Linux 34770
- Debian 10.10
- Debian Bullseye
- Fedora Server 34
- Rocky Linux 8.4
- Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.04
- openSUSE Leap 15.3
- openSUSE Tumbleweed

All of the Linux distributions were cleanly installed on this server in their out-of-the-box configuration. None of the tested Linux distributions were running into any troubles with this AMD EPYC 7002/7003 series server, to little surprise given that Milan builds off the mature Rome platform support and already being a few months past launch. The Linux support is mature though with a few exceptions particularly around virtualization like the SEV-SNP support or SEV live migration not yet being upstreamed into the Linux kernel (those items are still a WIP for upstream).

From this AMD EPYC 7543 1P server with 8 x 8GB DDR4-3200 RAM, and 1TB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD storage, a few dozen benchmarks were carried out for getting an idea how these 2021 Linux distributions compare performance wise for AMD Milan.

With running more than 50 different benchmarks, in this article are the geometric means looking at different logical areas of performance while all the benchmarks in full can be found over on OpenBenchmarking.org.