Linux 4.9 Kernel Officially Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 4.9 Kernel Officially Released

The Linux 4.9 kernel has been officially released...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.9-Released

[Krejzi]

Announcement was sent few minutes after you posted the article. Hooray for patience.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1612.1/01831.html

[timofonic]

Announcement was sent few minutes after you posted the article. Hooray for patience.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/k...2.1/01831.html

- Patience is the level of endurance one can have before negativity.
- Patience is stronger than force.
- Patience is the weapon that forces deception to reveal itself.
- Patience is when you're waiting for something better to happen.
- Patience is the mother of all virtues and the godmother of madness.
- Patience stagnates if isn't founded on hope.
- Patience is moral elasticity.

[finalzone]

That kernel is also bring the fix on ACPI for some laptop models i.e. X500Z series.

[haagch]

The interesting difference for amdgpu on my RX 480 is the cpu usage

4.8:


4.9:


I'm still not sure whether it is a regression.
Overall CPU usage is a noticeable bit lower while everything else stays the same, but I'm worried that the CPU usage on that thread is a possible bottleneck on slower CPU or with rendering while CPU load is high.

[chepati]

I'll test it tonight. I noticed a significant decrease in NVMe performance between 4.8.4 and later 4.8 kernels. Let's see if this regression has been fixed in 4.9.

[cj.wijtmans]

The ALX WOL patch no longer works so that must mean they did some work on the ALX driver. Did they finally fix WOL??

[cj.wijtmans]

The interesting difference for amdgpu on my RX 480 is the cpu usage

4.8:


4.9:


I'm still not sure whether it is a regression.
Overall CPU usage is a noticeable bit lower while everything else stays the same, but I'm worried that the CPU usage on that thread is a possible bottleneck on slower CPU or with rendering while CPU load is high.

Looks like its using a single core first before spawning another worker thread. Saves a lot of context switching and locking to use 2 cores fully instead of 4 partially. Just a guess. Should test if the latencies are better.

[haagch]

My hacky and incomplete solution for "late frames" shows less of those, while the FPS remain the same, so this indicates an improvement there.

In unigine heaven the buffer wait times remain the same, but I tried native csgo and previously when there was some action on the screen the FPS would be somewhere between 50 and 100. Now they very rarely dip below 100 FPS and the buffer wait time has been massively reduced. On the other hand there was also a small csgo update, so perhaps it got improved from that side too.

edit:
A while ago: https://i.imgur.com/91T3iCJ.png
Now: https://i.imgur.com/CWpcxlf.png
The GPU load is even lower now, but (I think thanks the lowered buffer wait times) it runs a lot better.

[cj.wijtmans]

My hacky and incomplete solution for "late frames" shows less of those, while the FPS remain the same, so this indicates an improvement there.

In unigine heaven the buffer wait times remain the same, but I tried native csgo and previously when there was some action on the screen the FPS would be somewhere between 50 and 100. Now they very rarely dip below 100 FPS and the buffer wait time has been massively reduced. On the other hand there was also a small csgo update, so perhaps it got improved from that side too.

edit:
A while ago: https://i.imgur.com/91T3iCJ.png
Now: https://i.imgur.com/CWpcxlf.png
The GPU load is even lower now, but (I think thanks the lowered buffer wait times) it runs a lot better.

in your screenshots there were more "late frames" though.