Early Linux 6.12 Kernel Benchmarks Showing Some Nice Gains On AMD Zen 5

With the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend and the bulk of the new feature merges now in the tree, I've begun running some Linux 6.12 benchmarks. Here is an initial look at Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 vs. 6.12 Git on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.

Many more benchmarks of Linux 6.12 will come after the merge window and on more diverse hardware platforms from desktop and mobile to servers, but for now here was an initial quick test run from this week in the pre-6.12-rc1 state.

The same kernel configuration used. Linux 6.12 Git was built from source since the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA was broken as of testing. No other changes to this Ryzen 9 9950X system during tests besides swapping the kernel builds.


Many workloads were flat across the tested kernels on this AMD Zen 5 desktop.

Scheduler benchmarks were showing some nice gains thanks to scheduler work merged during the Linux 6.12 merge window these past two weeks.




RabbitMQ message passing was showing better performance too on Linux 6.12.


Memcached also showing nice improvements with Linux 6.12. It will be nice if these gains are carried over on the server hardware too with future Linux 6.12 testing.

Nginx was another server workload with slight improvements on Linux 6.12 for this AMD Zen 5 system.

Stay tuned for more Linux 6.12 benchmarks on different Intel and AMD systems following the Linux 6.12-rc1 kernel release expected on Sunday.