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 cloud. Amazon Linux 2027 comes with many big package upgrades like Linux 7.1 as its default kernel compared to Linux 6.18 that is the current default on Amazon Linux 2023. The compiler leap is a big one going from GCC 11.5 by default to the new GCC 16.1. There are also other key upgrades like moving from Python 3.9 to Python 3.14. Some package updates aren't so significant like OpenJDK 25~26 with already having brought those updates back to Amazon Linux 2023. But beyond the package version upgrades, with Amazon Linux 2027 now using LTO compiler optimizations, x86-64-v3 to assume AVX/AVX2, and other fundamental improvements, it makes for an interesting benchmarking session. Amazon Linux 2027 packages are roughly based on Fedora 44~45 sources plus changes. Since yesterday I have been running fresh benchmarks of Amazon Linux 2023 in its current state against the new public preview of Amazon Linux 2027. Due to not being comped any cloud credits and the persistently very tight operating budget for Phoronix, I limited the Amazon Linux benchmarking to a single instance using the AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" using the general purpose m8a.4xlarge instance, given the popularity of cloud VMs at the 16 vCPU size being the most popular. The number of benchmarks run was also rather limited compared to my typical testing, again to minimize costs amid these difficult times in the web publishing space. The EPYC 9R45 with 16 vCPUs was paired with 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory and 400GB of local storage. From there Amazon Linux 2023 and Amazon Linux 2027 m8a.4xlarge benchmarks were conducted to see what the out-of-the-box performance means for this new Amazon Linux release.