Linux 6.12 To Linux 6.18 LTS Upgrade Offers Worthwhile Benefits For 5th Gen AMD EPYC
The OpenMP-threaded GraphicsMagick program showed the nice evolution of the Linux kernel performance with the newer versions of the Linux kernel on this AMD EPYC 9755 2P server.
Across a wide variety of workloads tested there were some nice performance gains moving from Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.18 LTS for this AMD EPYC 9005 series server and keeping the other hardware/software consistent.
When taking the geometric mean of the 90+ benchmarks conducted, going from Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.18 LTS yielded 1.07x the performance. Not bad for one year of Linux kernel progress from LTS-to-LTS release and not needing to make any other investments. In a number of workloads there were meaningful performance advantages to moving to Linux 6.18 LTS for this AMD EPYC Turin server.
Looking past the current Linux 6.18 LTS release, these benchmarks highlighted additional workloads where Linux 6.19 Git is currently regressing compared to Linux 6.18 and prior. At this point for some of those HPC benchmarks in particular it's not immediately known if it's due to the same scheduler regressions bisected already on Linux 6.19 Git or separate regressions. For that it looks like some more benchmarking over the holidays at Phoronix.
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