The Impact Of Switching To Linux 4.3 + Mesa-11.1/LLVM-3.8 On Ubuntu 15.10

Yesterday I posted some performance results of a Radeon R9 290 tested on Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 15.10 out-of-the-box. In this article are some numbers when upgrading the Ubuntu 15.10 installation to use the non-standard Linux 4.3 Git kernel as well as Mesa 11.1-devel Git that's built against LLVM 3.8 SVN for the newest open-source AMD Linux experience.

The Linux 4.3 kernel was obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel archive while the new Mesa 11.1-devel and LLVM 3.8 SVN stack is from this Launchpad PPA providing the very latest Mesa/LLVM support. It's sad that with Ubuntu 15.10, their Mesa 11.0 build is against LLVM 3.6 which means there isn't OpenGL 4.0/4.1 support with the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all Ubuntu users with a Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card or newer. Fortunately, using the aforementioned PPA makes it easy to tap the latest Mesa code while having a supported AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the necessary GL4 requirements.

Below are some of the results of Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 + Linux 4.3 + Mesa 11.1-dev with LLVM 3.8 SVN.
You can find all of this test data and plenty more Linux OpenGL benchmark results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. If you wish to support all of the Linux benchmarking work I do day in and day out, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Thanks!