Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.
Phoronix - review
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In my experience, the only thing a avg desktop user may actually notice is the responsiveness. That’s all I’ve seen…some kernels are sticky, some aren’t .
Now if I was spending hours ray tracing or compiling, I might notice a difference.
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The LTS kernel is beaten up hard which indicates staying on less stable stock kernel is a reasonable decision.
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This is to be expected. Not all performance improvements from kernel 5.16 to 6.1 have been backported to 5.15
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Benchmarked on latest and greatest CPU though, which experienced a full generational jump in the meantime.
I would be interested to see a benchmark with “average” hardware that was considered fully supported by the LTS. Does a Ryzen 3600 or i5-10400 also benefit in a similar way?
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I’m installed LTS Endeavour on two very old machine for work purpose, around 2009 era, one acer desktop pentium dual core/2gb ram and asus laptop core duo /4gb , same at 2.4ghz clock, the machines is pretty usables and “fastests” running quemu kvm and win 7 starter edition very smooth on laptop and other emu llike dosbox for old 1996 thermoregolation supervisor in hotel for acer box, cpu load still around 60% cpu temp 80 C°. No issue after 2 months system uptime 24/7.
Simply amazing!
This is about performance on Arch linux kernels using EndeavourOS as the testing platform. This is a very high end system.
From the same Ryzen 9 7950X + RX 6800 XT + Solidigm P41 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD system, all five Linux kernel builds were tested in their current upstream state as of this week atop the Endeavour OS rolling installation. No other changes were made to the system besides changing out the installed kernel via Pacman.
It is only relevant to equal hardware including network etc.
What it does point out is that EndeavourOS Rocks!! 
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And particularly well with a vanilla kernel.
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