Linux 4.0 Kernel Testing With AMD Radeon Graphics

With the Linux 4.0 kernel getting into shape here are some early benchmarks of three AMD Radeon graphics cards when comparing the Linux 4.0 Git performance to that of the Linux 3.19 stable kernel.

In looking for any performance improvements or regressions out of Linux 4.0 as it pertains to the Radeon DRM, I ran a number of benchmarks on both Linux 3.19.0 stable and Linux 4.0 Git from this weekend. The Radeon HD 6950, Radeon R9 270X, and Radeon R9 290 graphics cards were used for comparing the kernel builds while the user-space stack remained the same of using the Padkoa PPA with LLVM 3.7 SVN and Mesa 10.6-devel Git.

There's many DRM changes for Linux 4.0 (formerly known as Linux 3.20). Among the Radeon-specific work includes DisplayPort audio support, better fan control, indirect draw support work for Evergreen/Cayman GPUs. There's no changes that are explicitly performance-focused, but we've seen time and time again about performance changes that go in unnoticed or regressions that go introduced due to insufficient testing.

All benchmarks in this article were facilitated by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite automated benchmarking software.