Introduction

According to the Phoronix Test Suite website, PTS

is the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available that provides an extensible framework for which new tests can be easily added. The software is designed to effectively carry out both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner. The Phoronix Test Suite can be used for simply comparing your computer's performance with your friends and colleagues or can be used within your organization for internal quality assurance purposes, hardware validation, and continuous integration / performance management.

Among the strengths of Phoronix Test Suite are its ease of use, the large selection of tests available, the ability to automatically process results and, present them graphically. The software also integrates the OpenBenchmarking.org infrastructure, where users can review information on available tests and test suites, upload results to share these results with other users, and access previously uploaded results and the results of other users for comparison of results.

To benchmark the CachyOS kernels, Phoronix Test Suite was installed and configured on CachyOS 260308 as described in A Benchmark Comparison of CachyOS's Performance Optimized Kernels, which although not relevant for this benchmark, allows for sharing PTS resources among distributions installed on a multi-boot system.

The tests were performed on an installation of CachyOS 260308 with updates current as of May 16 2026. The hardware was a Lenove Legion 5i Pro (16ITH6) with an Intel Core-i7 11800H CPU, an integrated Intel UHD-630 integrated graphics card, a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX-3050 Mobile graphics card, 500 GB SK Hynix PCIe NVMe SSD, 1 TB Samsung Evo 980 PRO PCIe NVMe SSD, and 24 GB of RAM. The details of the hardware, according to Phoronix are shown in the following image, althoug the Phoronix hardware detection does not recognize a second 8GB Samsung RAM module.

The Details of the System Configuration

The benchmark tests were collected in a custom PTS test suite, the creation of which was described in Benchmarking with Phoronix Test Suite: Installation and Configuration. The selected tests were the nine tests (the number of tests accordint to the Phoronixarticle's results summary, not as identified by the Phoronix output in the following listing) that produced results with the largest variation in performance of the kernels in a Phornix benchmark compariosn of the Liquorix kernel against the upstream kernel. Using the same tests as those used by the Phornix site to compare the performance of different kernels is reasonable as the goal of the current test is to compare the performance of the various kernels offered by CachyOS. The tests in the current test was limited to a subset of those used by Phoronix in its comparison of the Liquorix kernel in order to reduce the test time. Readers with ample time and are interested in perfroming a comparison of the kernels can use the article referenced above as a guide for installing Phoronix Test Suite and creating a custom test suite that includes all of the tests in the Phoronix article.

The determination of the best performing CachyOS for overall system responsiveness was based on the tests that were filtered by the Phoronix Test Suite Result Viewer to not include outliers or those that that were "noisy" -- a term used by the Phoronix Test Suite Result Viewer.

Custom Test Suite

The custom test suite consisted of the individual tests listed in the output of phoronix-test-suite info custom-responsiveness, as shown in the following listing. The details of each of these tests can be viewed at OpenBenchmarking.org/tests. 

░▒▓  │  ~/.config/nvchad
▓▒░─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────░▒▓ at 09:38:54 PM  ▓▒░─╮
❯ sudo phoronix-test-suite info custom-responsiveness ─╯
[sudo] password for brook:


Phoronix Test Suite v10.8.6
custom-responsiveness

Suite Description: Kernel benchmark comparison based on the ten individual tests with the largest differences
between tested kernels in https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Liquorix-Performanc

Run Identifier: local/custom-responsiveness
Suite Version: 1.0.0
Maintainer: ORDINATECHNIC
Status:
Suite Type: System
Unique Tests: 3
Contained Tests:
Stress-NG Test: Semaphores
Stress-NG Test: Socket Activity
Stress-NG Test: Context Switching
srsRAN Project Test: PUSCH Processor Benchmark, Throughput Total
srsRAN Project Test: PUSCH Processor Benchmark, Throughput Thread
Hackbench Count: 16 - Type: Process
Hackbench Count: 16 - Type: Thread
Hackbench Count: 32 - Type: Process
Hackbench Count: 32 - Type: Thread
16 Tests / 3 Unique Tests


░▒▓  │  ~/.config/nvchad ▓▒░─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────░▒▓ took 5s  │
at 09:40:55 PM  ▓▒░─╮
❯ ─╯

Tested Kernels

Tested Kernel Properties
Kernel LTO PGO CPU Process Scheduler
cachyos X X EEVDF
cachyos-bmq BMQ
cachyos-bmq-lto X BMQ
cachyos-bore BORE
cachyos-bore-lto X BORE

Test Execution

The test runs were executed after booting into CachyOS and selecting the kernel to be executed from the GRUB menu. No other applications were running. The WiFi interface was connected and the same default services were enabled for each run. In each case the, the test suite was executed using the Phoronix Test Suite command 

sudo phoronix-test-suite benchmark custom-responsiveness
where custom-responsiveness is the custom test suite created as described in Benchmarking with Phoronix Test Suite: Installation and Configuration.

The following set of images show some of the output when executing the command.

The Output Produced by PTSDuring Test Execution

Results

The benchmark results were surprising in that default kernel performed better than the kernels with alternative CPU process schedulers. This was true even in the case of the kernels with alternative schedulers that are -- like the default kernel -- optimized with LTO. The following set of images from Phoronix Test Suite Results Viewer summarizes the test results.

Results Overview

Results Overview
All five kernels tested had similar results for most tests except the Context Switching component of Stress-NG. In that test cachyos, cachyos-bore, and cachyos-bore-ltocachyos-bmq and cachyos-bmq-lto performed better than the others in the Semaphores component of Stress-NG.

Overall Winner

The tests determined that the overall winner was the default CachyOS kernel cachyos, as shown in the image below.

The Geometric Mean of all Results

Best Performing Kernel in the Most Tests

It finished first in more tests than any of the other kernels, followed by cachyos-bore-lto. In tests where noisy and incomplete measurements were discarded , it had the best performance in 60% of the tests, followed by cachyos-bore-lto which came in first in 40% of the tests. In tests where none of the results were discarded, both cachyos and cachyos-bore-lto came in first in 37% of the tests, but in this case cachyos-bmq also came in first in 25% of the tests. This is shown in the following set of images.

The Default CachyOS Kernel, cachyos, Finished First In More Tests
cachyos finished first in the most tests. The first image in this set is based on tests where incomplete and noisy data was removed before producing the graph, and the second image is based on all tests.

Worst Performing in the Most Tests

Not only did the cachyos and cachyos-bore-lto, come in first, in all of the tests (filtered results), they did not come in last in any of the tests. The following set of images show that in the filtered results (first image in the following set), cachyos-bmq had the worst performance in a notable 80% of the tests, with cachyos-bmq-lto having the worst performance in the remaining 20% of the tests. When test results are unfiltered cachyos-bmq also had the worst performance in most of the tests at 62% (second image in the following set).

The Default CachyOS Kernel, cachyos, Finished First In More Tests
cachyos finished first in the most tests. The first image in this set is based on tests where incomplete and noisy data was removed before producing the graph, and the second image is based on all tests.

Individual Test Results

Individual Test Results

Conclusion