XanMod's Linux 5.10 Kernel Helping Tap Extra Performance With The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

For those wondering how the likes of the XanMod and Liquorix kernel spins are competing these days with the mainline Linux kernel, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at these popular derivatives of the Linux kernel. XanMod in particular atop Ubuntu can easily help squeeze extra performance out of the system as shown by these benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop.

The Liquorix kernel patches the Linux kernel with the MuQSS scheduler, high resolution scheduling, hard kernel preemption, BFQ I/O scheduler, and other tuning to help with the system responsiveness and throughput. More details on the Liquorix changes can be found at Liquorix.net.

XanMod is another popular kernel flavor with enthusiasts. XanMod carries some of the same patches as Liquorix along with various networking patches, the CacULE scheduler, and many other additional patches. More details on it can be found at XanMod.org.

For our testing we were using the latest official Ubuntu binaries from the XanMod and Liquorix projects that are currently based on Linux 5.10. The kernel configurations used for testing were:

Ubuntu 20.10 Default - The default Linux 5.8 kernel as shipped by Ubuntu 20.10.

Liquorix Kernel - The latest Linux 5.10 based Liquorix build as of testing.

XanMod Kernel - The latest Linux 5.10 based XanMod kernel as of testing

Linux 5.10.7 Vanilla - The latest upstream Linux 5.10 kernel from mainline and as packaged via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

Linux 5.11 Git - As a look ahead, the latest Linux 5.11 development code from mainline and as obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

Each kernel was tested with all of its default configurations including for the respective frequency scaling governors, I/O schedulers, etc.

The same AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with Radeon RX 5600 XT desktop was used for all of this benchmarking on Ubuntu 20.10. Via the Phoronix Test Suite there were dozens of different benchmarks carried out for looking at the performance of these Linux kernel flavors.