Ubuntu 21.04 Server Performance Offering Nice Gains For AMD EPYC 7003 Series

In some of the video encode workloads we were also seeing some minor gains in performance with Ubuntu 21.04. Given the same compiler version tested and based on our past CPUFreq comparisons, some of these gains may be explained by the switch to CPUFreq Schedutil by default.

Compiling the Rust-written Wasmer was noticeably quicker with the Rust packages on Ubuntu 21.04.

The ASKAP benchmark was trending faster on Ubuntu 21.04.

There are big wins to find with the AES-XTS crypto performance on Ubuntu 21.04. This comes thanks to the newer kernel at play with upstream kernel developers recently realizing the AES-NI XTS performance has been significantly degraded in the presence of return trampolines (Retpolines) since 2018 as part of the Spectre mitigations. With even the latest AMD Zen 3 processors still relying on Retpolines, the new kernel of Ubuntu 21.04 yields big wins in the cryptsetup AES-XTS benchmarks. Other crypto operations are not impacted by that fix.