Intel's One Line Of Linux Code For Speeding-Up Sapphire Rapids On Ubuntu
Certainly for those doing a lot of video encoding/transcoding on Sapphire Rapids servers with a stock Ubuntu installation, making sure you are upgraded to a patched kernel is very important for maximizing the potential. Or switch to the P-State performance governor.
The ClickHouse database server performance with mainline Linux 6.3 was also much better now than with mainline Linux 6.2.
The Apache HTTP web server performance was also much better now when using the powersave governor on Linux 6.3+ or with back-ported Ubuntu kernels.
Here is a look at the combined CPU package power consumption of the Xeon Platinum 8490H processors during the course of all the benchmarks carried out. There was the obvious increase in CPU power consumption but for the vast majority of benchmarks it meant better performance-per-Watt than the default behavior in Linux 6.2 and prior. The power consumption also wasn't as high as when using the performance governor.
When taking the geometric mean of all the raw benchmark results, the stock Linux 6.3 kernel with this P-State driver patch was 62.5% faster than Linux 6.2 and prior when using the P-State powersave governor as used by default on Ubuntu and other select Linux distributions.
It'd be great to see Ubuntu change over to the performance governor by default for at least Ubuntu Server or other cases of running Ubuntu on high-performance CPUs, but alas it's still using P-State powersave by default. Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS and many other Linux distributions meanwhile default to the performance governor for delivering optimal Linux server performance. In any case for those making use of the P-State powersave configuration with an Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" server, you'll definitely want to upgrade to Linux 6.3 or a kernel with the back-ported patches like the latest Ubuntu kernel stable release updates. This is a big improvement to performance on Sapphire Rapids thanks to this one line of code.
Besides this one line tweak, Intel's open-source engineers also continue working on other significant Linux kernel improvements for enhancing Linux x86_64 performance.
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