Amazon Linux 2027 Shows Off Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC In The AWS Cloud
Yesterday AWS announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027 as their successor to the current Amazon Linux 2023 in-house distribution. With all the software upgrades and improvements like building packages now with link-time optimizations (LTO), enforcing x86-64-v3 builds, and other changes, I was eager to run some performance benchmarks of Amazon Linux 2023 vs. Amazon Linux 2027 in the EC2…
AWS announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027, the successor to Amazon Linux 2023, highlighting the performance gains achieved on AMD EPYC in the AWS cloud. The new Amazon Linux 2027 comes with significant package upgrades, including Linux 7.1 as the default kernel (previously Linux 6.18) and a compiler leap from GCC 11.5 to the new GCC 16.1.
Additionally, there are notable improvements such as moving from Python 3.9 to Python 3.14, and the implementation of LTO compiler optimizations and x86-64-v3 to support AVX/AVX2. These crucial upgrades make Amazon Linux 2027 an interesting benchmarking candidate.
Phoronix conducted fresh benchmarks of Amazon Linux 2023 against the new public preview of Amazon Linux 2027, running them on a single instance using the AMD EPYC 5th Gen Turion, specifically the general-purpose m8a.4xlarge instance. The benchmarking was limited due to budget constraints, focusing on the 16 vCPU size, which is popular among cloud VMs. The AMD EPYC 9R45 processor was paired with 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory and 400GB of local storage.
By comparing the out-of-the-box performance of Amazon Linux 2023 and Amazon Linux 2027 on the m8a.4xlarge instance, the new release's performance improvements can be evaluated.
Written by urgent.news from Phoronix's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
