Benchmarking The Different CachyOS Linux Kernel Flavors
CachyOS ships with a good Linux kernel configuration by default balancing the different features as well as performance. But they also ship a variety of other kernel builds for those preferring a more leading-edge kernel or the current LTS series, a hardened kernel configuration, and more. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution with some of its main kernel flavors.
👁 Pacman CachyOS kernel installation
CachyOS ships a variety of customized kernel flavors to cater to different CPU enhancements, kernel features, and performance optimizations. All of the CachyOS kernel flavors are outlined on the CachyOS Wiki. For the purposes of today's benchmarking I had tested the following CachyOS kernels:
linux-cachyos - Default: The default kernel shipped by CachyOS and their recommended choice unless having specific needs. For a default kernel it's already well optimized in being built with Clang and making use of ThinLTO and AutoFDO compiler optimizations.
linux-cachyos-lts: The Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version in CachyOS, currently tracking Linux 6.18 LTS.
linux-cachyos-rc: The latest release candidate Linux kernel build in CachyOS flavor. When this testing happened last week it was on Linux 7.1-rc4.
linux-cachyos-hardened: This CachyOS kernel build carries the linux-hardened patch set and kernel configuration enabled for extra security hardening at the expense of performance and some features not being supported in this security-restricted environment.
linux-cachyos-server: The server flavor of CachyOS tuned for server workloads.
All of these CachyOS kernels were tested on the same workstation, which was the new System76 Thelio Major powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X processor, 128GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, and the Gigabyte Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB graphics card.
Let's see how these different CachyOS kernels are influencing performance over a variety of workloads.