The Performance Benefits Of Linux 6.12 LTS Over Linux 6.6 LTS
The most significant performance difference observed with the LTS kernel upgrade was with the context switching performance measured by Stress-NG... A whopping 88% boost to the context switching speed from the new Long Term Support kernel. This is likely due to CPU security mitigation handling improvements made over the past year as well as other general kernel optimizations in this area.
The cryptsetup benchmarks for measuring the kernel's cryptography performance is huge real-world win going from Linux 6.6 LTS to Linux 6.12 LTS both on modern Intel and AMD systems... This comes thanks to a number of AVX-related crypto implementations upstreamed by Google engineer Eric Biggers over the past year. For those using the kernel crypto code for disk encryption and other purposes can benefit from much faster performance thanks to the new AVX implementations and other enhancements made.
Llama.cpp on this AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X workstation also enjoyed some nice improvements out of Linux 6.12 LTS over 6.6... Off hand I don't know the definitive reason for this but may be due to the AMD P-State enhancements and other general improvements made in this area over the past year.