Linux 6.12 To Linux 6.18 LTS Upgrade Offers Worthwhile Benefits For 5th Gen AMD EPYC
With the code compilation benchmarks on this AMD EPYC 9005 server, the build speeds gradually improved with the newer versions of the Linux kernel while keeping to the same GCC 15 compiler throughout. Some incremental improvements to build speed but can be noticeable for large codebases like when compiling the Linux kernel with all x86_64 modules. For CI/CD servers these few second time savings can add up over the course of a day.
Not only was the allmodconfig kernel build the fastest on Linux 6.19 but it also had slightly lower power consumption on the two EPYC 9755 processors for also enjoying the best performance-per-Watt.
For the OpenVINO AI toolkit there was slightly better performance on the post-6.12 kernels. That includes patches that ended up being back-ported to the Linux 6.12 series with v6.12.62 showing the consistent slightly better performance over the original v6.12 state.
Meanwhile for Intel's oneDNN neural network library there was clearly better performance when jumping from Linux 6.12 to Linux 6.18+. Very nice gains here.
One of the changes to the kernel in Linux 6.18 LTS compared to Linux 6.12 LTS is the change-over this year of using AMD P-State by default on AMD EPYC 9005 platforms rather than the ACPI CPUFreq driver. That CPU frequency scaling driver change can help out in some of these user-space workloads with the kernel default shifting from acpi-cpufreq performance to amd-pstate-epp performance.