Benchmarks Of Arch Linux's Zen Kernel Flavor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Benchmarks Of Arch Linux's Zen Kernel Flavor

Following the recent Linux kernel tests of Liquorix and other scheduler discussions (and more), some requests from premium supporters rolled in for seeing the performance of Arch Linux's Zen kernel package against the generic kernel. Here are those benchmark results...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arch-Linux-Zen-Kernel-Tests

[Linuxxx]

What's actually interesting here is this little detail:

Scaling Governor: acpi-cpufreq schedutil

Now when checking the value of
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/schedutil/rate_limit_us it should read
10000 (i.e. 10ms) which is just way too high! Try what Android already does (echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/schedutil/rate_limit_us) and see how that works out for you (which could be anyone, really).

[kudraw]

Hi, I'm new here! Thanks to Micheal and Phoronix for all those interesting readings. It would also be nice to see some comparison on power consumption for the vanilla Linux kernel with the CFS scheduler against the MuQSS and other out-tree schedulers.

[birdie]

Compiling the kernel with -O4 like many Gentoo users have been doing for years would have surely given them better results.

Oh, wait, -O4 doesn't exist and works as -O3 and -O3 in its turn often doesn't give any benefits but makes your binaries a lot bigger.

Well, time to dig into `man gcc` and find something no one has been using before. -ffast-math for the win! Oh wait, it's unsafe to use.

Exercises with uber-optimizations will probably never cease. Maybe 'cause people don't write compilers while believing there's some hidden untapped potential only for them.

[timofonic]

Compiling the kernel with -O4 like many Gentoo users have been doing for years would have surely given them better results.

Oh, wait, -O4 doesn't exist and works as -O3 and -O3 in its turn often doesn't give any benefits but makes your binaries a lot bigger.

Well, time to dig into `man gcc` and find something no one has been using before. -ffast-math for the win! Oh wait, it's unsafe to use.

Exercises with uber-optimizations will probably never cease. Maybe 'cause people don't write compilers while believing there's some hidden untapped potential only for them.

Gentoo Ricers FTW!!!!111

[kerbastrar]

Only reason why I use linux-zen is because it contains Valve's fsync patch. Other than that, doubtful anyone will notice anything outside of synthetic benchmarks

[CochainComplex]

Gentoo Ricers FTW!!!!111

Unixp0rn !!!

[Archprogrammer]

Exercises with uber-optimizations will probably never cease. Maybe 'cause people don't write compilers while believing there's some hidden untapped potential only for them.

Well, there are some cases where there are significant gains to be had by choosing specific compiler optimizations - but just adding -O3 usually doesn't do all that much. I recall a paper about using genetic algorithms to choose compiler flags from about 20 years ago but I don't think it caught on. Probably not worth the effort except in very rare cirumstances.

[Mark Rose]

Well, there are some cases where there are significant gains to be had by choosing specific compiler optimizations - but just adding -O3 usually doesn't do all that much. I recall a paper about using genetic algorithms to choose compiler flags from about 20 years ago but I don't think it caught on. Probably not worth the effort except in very rare cirumstances.

Profile Guided Optimizations are what make Clear so much faster than other distributions. They are well worth the effort.

[nuetzel]

Profile Guided Optimizations are what make Clear so much faster than other distributions. They are well worth the effort.

Some numbers for Mesa git comming. Are ready but must be sent and/or edited.
As teaser:
~ +20% for OpenGL (radeonsi, Polaris 20)
and size down over a third

@Michael:
I'll going over Mesa Devel List but CC you and you can resubmit if you like.