After A Bumpy Cycle, AMD Performance Will Shine Brighter On Linux 5.11

Given the CPUFreq patch, for those wondering how CPUFreq Performance vs. Ondemand vs. Schedutil now plays out across different workloads, there are some benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

The performance governor still performs better as would be expected, but schedutil/ondemand are better off than we have seen on prior kernel releases.

I've also been testing the CPUFreq patched on Threadripper too... Long story short, it just further confirms the Linux 5.11 performance regression being addressed. Compared to past benchmarks I've run on this Threadripper 3970X system, often times the Linux 5.11 patched performance is ahead of prior stable series.

So at this point with the pending CPUFreq patches the Linux 5.11 performance is in very good shape on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 in my testing from small Ryzen laptops up through big Threadripper and EPYC boxes. Not only is the performance regression addressed but in a number of tests the Linux 5.11 performance is better than where left off by Linux 5.10 stable (and prior) series.

It's been a busy past month of unexpected benchmarking due to this regression but now confident in saying that once the new CPUFreq patches land everything is in great shape for Linux 5.11. Plus with the new Linux 5.11 features bringing many other AMD improvements like s2idle work, RAPL PowerCap support for all Zen CPUs, the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) was finally merged for AMD Ryzen laptops, Zen 3 support in the AMD Energy driver, the AMD SB-TSI sensor driver was merged along with the SoC PMC driver, Van Gogh / Green Sardine APU graphics support, and more, this is a very exciting kernel release for AMD Linux customers. Plus there are other general features worth getting excited about like Syscall User Dispatch, a lot of file-system work, Intel WiFi 6GHz support, and other new hardware working on the mainline kernel.

Look for the CPUFreq work to land in the coming days and the Linux 5.11 stable release to happen in the next week or two followed by the Linux 5.12 cycle. Linux 5.11 has added emphasis as it will likely be the kernel powering the likes of Ubuntu 21.04 and others this spring.