Intel Spots A 3888.9% Performance Improvement In The Linux Kernel From One Line Of Code

[Etherman]

Tend to agree... news like this are mostly curiosity rather than anything serious

I find it interesting and news worthy.
Should I have THP on or off? Maybe this tips the scales?

[fitzie]

nice. with this performance boost I can avoid upgrading my machine. even if this isn't representative of my typical load, I'm sure they will find other 1 line speed ups in the future.

[Palu Macil]

So intel didn't have any hand in finding the fix or authoring the change, and only found the results the authors expected.

Why is this news again?

This article was a bit lower quality than normal…

[erniv2]

I find it interesting and news worthy.
Should I have THP on or off? Maybe this tips the scales?

If you use a common distribution like ubuntu or fedora it is set to madvise (the app has to ask for hugepages) and the only app that comes to mind that uses hugepages in a standard setup i came across is qemu, so no you dont have to even bother thinking about it in your desktop workuse.

[gregzeng]

Journalism is journalism. Phoronix used to try having its own type of benchmark tests. There are many benchmark tests for both Linux and Windows now. How do these more stable, more authoritative tests perform?

The Linux Foundation releases the raw source code every week now. Both revisions of the Linux kernel. Plus new Linux kernels. There are also a few independent compilers of these Linux kernels.

With so many kernel compiled codes, many specialise in improving Linux performance. Do these actually increase performance, at the expense of other factors?

There are also many versions of Linux. Does it matter which version? Red Hat, Debian, Linux From Scratch, etc. Similarly there are a few versions of Microsoft Windows. Do these versions also matter? On the many e ways of benching.

Now that Phoronix is mostly journalism, rather than benching, perhaps my questions could be answered.

Similarly, do the many variations of the CPU from AMD show big improvements with Linux, instead of Microsoft Windows?

[bug77]

...the headline IS rather clickbait-y...

Only if you're new to Phoronix.
On one hand, there's only so much you can say in a title before it turns into a paragraph. On the other hand, people don't exactly throw money at Michael, so can you really blame him? Me, having been here for a while, I know exactly what to expect when I see a title like that.

[mr_tawan]

Pardon my weak English .... but what exactly does 600% slowdown mean? Like if the original score is 100, then what is the slowdown score?

[ejolson]

...now we see if that change makes difference in a real-life workloads

The 600 percent regression in real workloads had already been noticed in a numerical differential equations library

https://einsteintoolkit.org/

As mentioned already this library is also used in the cactuBSSN component of the Spec CPU benchmark. The regression has already mysteriously appeared in hardware reviews. For example

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/skymont-intels-e-cores-reach-for-the-sky

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/lion-cove-intels-p-core-roars

and there are others.

[sfjuocekr]

It is always one line of code...

[toves]

Pardon my weak English .... but what exactly does 600% slowdown mean? Like if the original score is 100, then what is the slowdown score?

Think of 600% as 6× then 600% slowdown probably means 6 times slower or 1/6 of the original speed.

I would have thought this might more normally be stated as 16.67% of the original speed or a 5/6 (83.33%) slowdown.

Unfortunately English in the hands of marketing types and Americans is a bit like Humpty Dumpty's words^*, it means whatever it suits them to have you think it means.

* “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
'The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass