Testing Intel FSGSBASE Patches For Helping Elevate Linux Performance

When running 111 benchmarks, those are the results with a measurable difference. Granted, not all of the 111 benchmarks ran were entirely relevant to FSGSBASE but a matter of running many diverse real-world workloads in also looking to ensure no major regressions or other problematic behavior from this kernel change.

If taking the geometric mean of all the tests carried out, the overall kernel performance on this Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh server was up by 4%. But if dropping all of the results without a statistically significant difference to come to the 31 benchmarks with a measurable difference, the FSGSBASE patches for those impacted workloads yields a 13% improvement on average. Those wanting to dig through all the numbers can do so via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

So far in our testing of the x86/fsgsbase branch testing we haven't encountered any major issues and so hopefully that continues to be the case for others testing it and this feature will successfully land in Linux 5.9.