Some Meaningful Performance Benefits For Clang + LTO Built Linux Kernels
To not much surprise, some of the Stress-NG kernel micro-benchmarks were helped out by the Clang + LTO kernel build of Linux 6.19.
The Nginx HTTPS web server performance of serving up static files was also improved with the Clang + LTO kernel build on this AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.
For the majority of different 163 benchmarks conducted spanning many different domains there was little change to the performance. But if ignoring the unchanged data and focusing in on the two dozen or so benchmarks where there was a measurable difference, for those areas there was benefit from a Clang-built x86_64 and especially more so when making use of the upstream Full LTO capabilities. For those workloads the Clang + LTO Linux 6.19 kernel allowed for around 6% higher performance over the standard GCC 15.2 built kernel.
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