Linux 7.0 Shows Significant PostgreSQL Performance Gains On AMD EPYC
With the Panther Lake testing on Linux 7.0 there were consistent regressions in the video encoding workloads but on this AMD EPYC Turin testing the performance was regression-free on this big kernel upgrade.
The Panther Lake testing showed the context switching time increasing significantly under Linux 7.0 but that wasn't observed with this AMD EPYC 9755 Gigabyte server benchmarking.
The Intel Panther Lake Linux 7.0 testing had shown improved kernel message passing performance. On this AMD EPYC server too there was a very significant speed-up observed with the message passing performance using the Stress-NG benchmark.
The socket activity also improved quite nicely on Linux 7.0 with this AMD EPYC Zen 5 server.
The Panther Lake testing showed an improvement on Linux 7.0 for the pthread performance and this also came across on AMD EPYC as a very nice improvement with this next kernel version.
Overall there were some small improvements in real-world workloads but the real standout with this initial round of AMD EPYC server benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was the much faster PostgreSQL read/write performance. With AMD EPYC 9005 series already performing great with PostgreSQL relative to the competition, this is a very nice improvement to look forward to with this kernel version that will be powering Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other 2026 Linux distributions. Kernel micro-benchmarks via Stress-NG was showing very nice gains in areas like socket passing and message passing under Linux 7.0.
Thankfully there weren't any regressions observed like was found on the Panther Lake test laptop. Linux 7.0 benchmarking on more hardware is ongoing at Phoronix and will ramp up with the Linux 7.0 merge window closing this Sunday with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1.
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