Ubuntu 21.10 Performance Continues In The Right Direction For AArch64

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 21.10 Performance Continues In The Right Direction For AArch64

As a good sign ahead of the important Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release in the spring, Ubuntu 21.10 further ups the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) performance. Here is a look at some of the gains in going from Ubuntu 21.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 21.10.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30647

[perpetually high]

Love when the benchmarks are all consistent.

Side note: Has anyone tried the new KFENCE?

With kernel 5.13, Ubuntu 21.10 adds support for Kernel Electric Fence (KFENCE), a new run-time memory error detector designed for production environments. KFENCE keeps the overhead low whilst detecting the most common memory errors. Enabled by default, Ubuntu 21.10 will randomise the memory location of the kernel stack at each system-call entry on both the amd64 and arm64 architectures with a minimum impact on performance.

Source: Ubuntu Blog

Kernel Electric-Fence (KFENCE) is a low-overhead sampling-based memory safety error detector. KFENCE detects heap out-of-bounds access, use-after-free, and invalid-free errors.

KFENCE is designed to be enabled in production kernels, and has near zero performance overhead. Compared to KASAN, KFENCE trades performance for precision. The main motivation behind KFENCE’s design, is that with enough total uptime KFENCE will detect bugs in code paths not typically exercised by non-production test workloads. One way to quickly achieve a large enough total uptime is when the tool is deployed across a large fleet of machines.

Source: docs.kernel.org

[schmidtbag]

Love when the benchmarks are all consistent.

Same - I'm always wary of overall improvements when I see something has regressed, but when all tests across the board have improved, that's a great sign. Of course, this could potentially mean higher power consumption, but so long as it's proportionate, that isn't a bad thing. For ARM, a 5% rise in performance is fine if it means <=5% increase in wattage.

[PerformanceExpert]

Same - I'm always wary of overall improvements when I see something has regressed, but when all tests across the board have improved, that's a great sign. Of course, this could potentially mean higher power consumption, but so long as it's proportionate, that isn't a bad thing. For ARM, a 5% rise in performance is fine if it means <=5% increase in wattage.

5% overall is quite a large gain indeed, I guess from compiler optimization and better vectorization. Generally performance improvements from optimization improve perf/Watt since you execute fewer instructions and finish a task faster.