Linux 5.1 To Linux 5.6 Benchmarks On The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

For those wondering how the Threadripper 3990X is performing with the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel, here are benchmarks of a recent development snapshot of Linux 5.6 as well as benchmarking all of the major kernel releases going back to Linux 5.1.

This Threadripper 3990X testing continues to be done from the mighty powerful and beautiful System76 Thelio Major workstation. A wide variety of workloads were benchmarked for Linux 5.1 through Linux 5.6 on this 64-core / 128-thread beast.

Though due to the Navi graphics not being supported back to Linux 5.1, there are not graphics tests as part of this comparison (but there is a Linux 5.6 AMDGPU comparison separately for those interested).





IO_uring is one of the areas that has improved nicely since its introduction in Linux 5.1... Mostly on the feature front but for some of the I/O tests, there have been performance improvements since 5.1 as well.

The pmbench paging/VM benchmark did see some minor improvements on newer kernels.


iPerf was reporting lower localhost TCP socket performance since Linux 5.3.

The Hackbench scheduler benchmark was also seeing worse performance since Linux 5.3.






For most of the heavy CPU workloads on the Threadripper 3990X, there wasn't much change to see out of the tested kernels.

PostgreSQL read performance appears to have regressed on Linux 5.5.


But other databases were looking good.

Thanks to the mighty power of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, I'll be looking at some of these kernel regressions in more detail over the weekend.