With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I’ve looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel’s in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.
Using the same AMD EPYC 9755 2P server using the Volcano reference server platform, Samsung 3.8TB NVMe SSD storage, and 24 x 64GB DDR5-6000 memory, I’ve been running benchmarks on the various latest Linux distributions to see where things stand for the Linux server performance as we approach the middle of 2025. The Linux distributions benchmarked on this AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server for today’s comparison included:
– Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
– Ubuntu 24.04 LTS + HWE
– Ubuntu 24.10
– Ubuntu 25.04 Beta
– Fedora Server 41
– Fedora Server 41 + Updates
– Fedora Server 42
– AlmaLinux 9.5
– Clear Linux 43250
Thus a nice look at the Ubuntu and Fedora performance alongside AlmaLinux 9.5 for the current RHEL/RHEL-like 9 experience and then Clear Linux for the very latest Linux performance optimizations out of Intel.
All of the Linux distributions were benchmarked in their fresh, out-of-the-box environment while using the performance CPUFreq governor for some added consistency.
