An Early Look At AMD EPYC Performance Gains On Linux 6.0

With Linux 6.0 having some big scheduler changes and tuning that should specifically benefit AMD Zen systems, I've been eager to see how some high core count EPYC servers will benefit from this next version of the Linux kernel. While just a few days into the Linux 6.0 merge window, here are some early benchmarks showing some of the areas where Linux 6.0 is allowing higher performance out of existing AMD EPYC 7003 series hardware.

For your viewing pleasure today are some early benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7713 2P performance on Linux 6.0 Git compared to Linux 5.19 and 5.18 stable kernels plus also tossing in the older Linux 5.15 LTS kernel due to its long-term support state. All these benchmarks were conducted on the same AMD Daytona reference server with dual EPYC 7713 64-core processors.

The Linux 6.0 state was as of 3 August following the scheduler merge and various other pull requests that landed thus far... Once the Linux 6.0 merge window is completed in full at the end of next week, I'll be around with plenty more benchmarks on AMD EPYC and other Intel/AMD/Arm platforms in looking at how the performance is evolving for this next major version of the Linux kernel.

Already though these early Linux 6.0 benchmarks on the AMD EPYC 7713 2P server are looking quite promising for continuing to evolve the open-source AMD Linux server performance:


Database servers are one of the areas that saw immediate improvements out of the early Linux 6.0 code.









PostgreSQL, RocksDB, ClickHouse, and Nginx are some of the notable workloads to show off improvements when moving to the early Linux 6.0 state on this AMD EPYC 7713 2P server. So far this is shaping up to be an exciting kernel release.

Aside from the scheduler changes, IO_uring has seen some nice improvements with Linux 6.0 too.

Stay tuned to Phoronix for more benchmarks on AMD EPYC and other desktops and servers as the Linux 6.0 material continues landing and begins the stabilization period ahead of the official v6.0 release that should come by the start of October.