Amazon Linux 2027 Shows Off Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC In The AWS Cloud
September 4, 2026
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.
Of the HPC workloads tested, Amazon Linux 2027 in its preview form was typically running slightly faster than Amazon Linux 2023. AMD EPYC Turin already is well supported and running great on Amazon Linux 2023 while now is just some icing on the cake for many of these benchmarks.
Due to Amazon Linux 2023 updating its default OpenJDK Java version, there wasn’t much to see out of the Java workloads tested.
The OS-supplied Zstd package was slightly faster on Amazon Linux 2027 in moving from Zstandard 1.5.5 to t.5.7 plus the package build optimizations.
When compiling 7-Zip from source, the default toolchain with Amazon Linux 2027 was providing faster performance than when built and run under Amazon Linux 2023.
When testing the operating system supplied 7-Zip binaries, Amazon Linux 2027 was also faster than AL2023 and there it moved from 7-Zip 25.01 to 26.02.
When measuring the time to compile different programs, Amazon Linux 2027 was slightly slower than AL2023. But not unexpected. Typically the newer compilers add new optimizations and other features at the expense of slightly longer build times. From AL2023 to AL2027 is moving from GCC 11 to GCC 16.
OpenSSL 3.5 was supplied on both Amazon Linux distributions while the AL2027 build came out slightly faster than AL2023.
The Dragonflydb database built from source was showing off some nice performance wins on Amazon Linux 2023 with this AMD EPYC VM.
Cryptsetup for exercising the Linux kernel’s crypto code was showing some nice performance gains under Amazon Linux 2027.
With the move from Python 3.9 to Python 3.14, Amazon Linux 2027 delivered some nice performance gains for Python on this AMD EPYC M8A instance.
The Llama.cpp AI CPU-based performance was largely the same between these Amazon Linux tests but again the scope of the testing was more limited than normal to minimize cloud costs.
Long story short, from my tests over the past 24 hours the Amazon Linux 2027 release is performing quite well and I didn’t encounter any functional issues in testing this public preview while enjoying some nice incremental performance gains.
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