Linux 6.8 Running Well On The AMD Threadripper 7980X, Maintaining Gains Made With v6.7

Over the weekend I shared some benchmarks showing some nice performance gains with Linux 6.7 over the 6.6 kernel when running on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X HEDT processor within the new System76 Thelio. So now you may be wondering about the performance with the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel... Here are some early tests there.

With the System76 Thelio workstation testing with Threadripper 7980X, there were some nice gains on Linux 6.7 over Linux 6.6 for AI and other workloads. This may be due to the EEVDF scheduler work or other optimizations but I haven't bisected it to conclusively narrow it down at this point. After all, a win is a win with not showing any negative repercussions. The good news is with Linux 6.8 these performance improvements are maintained.

The new System76 Thelio Major.

Following that Linux 6.7 vs. 6.6 testing, I then ran a Linux 6.8 Git kernel build on the same hardware and same Pop!_OS software stack to see how the new kernel version is looking at its state now just being at 6.8-rc1... There's still two months to go before the stable release, but right now it's looking good.

In my testing of the Linux 6.8 state against 6.7 / 6.6, there weren't any real surprises. There were just some minor fluctations in the kernel micro-benchmarks from Stress-NG and any other changes were just small and within the margin of error. So no exciting gains found at this point from Linux 6.8 on this System76 workstation, but on a positive note the gains from Linux 6.7 are maintained.

Those wanting to dig through all these kernel benchmarks in full can find them via this OpenBenchmarking.org result page for the nearly 100 benchmarks in full.

I am currently running early Linux 6.8 kernel benchmarks on other hardware in looking out for any other possible performance changes.