Initial Benchmarks Of Schedutil Performance On Linux 5.7 Show Room Still For Improvement

With Linux 5.7 the kernel is preparing to use the Schedutil governor more often on Intel systems. That change affects the CPUfreq default as well as the Intel P-State driver when in passive mode. While Schedutil holds a lot of hope, at least on Linux 5.7 with the testing I've done thus far the results show the raw performance slipping while testing on more platforms is forthcoming.

For some preliminary tests of the state of Schedutil vs. performance/ondemand governors in Linux 5.7 I ran some benchmarks on an Intel Xeon Gold 6226R server with Supermicro X11SPL-F motherboard, 188GB of RAM, and 4TB Micron NVMe SSD. A near final Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot was running on this Intel server while running Linux 5.6 stable and then a Linux 5.7 Git snapshot last week following the power management changes landing. On Linux 5.6 the default powersave configuration was tested while on Linux 5.7 the powersave/performance/schedutil governors were all tested.

More Schedutil/performance governor tests will be coming on a greater number of Intel systems using the latest Linux 5.7 Git shortly. For this article are just some preliminary numbers for those curious how this governor is now performing that relies upon scheduler utilization data for making more informed frequency scaling decisions.