Upgrading Linux 5.15 LTS To Linux 6.1 Can Yield Additional Performance For AMD EPYC "Milan" Servers

It depends upon the particular workload, but simply moving to a newer (LTS) kernel can mean better HPC/server performance even without changing the underlying compiler or other software updates.

The OpenFOAM computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software was one of the interesting workloads that continues to see better performance on Milan-X with newer kernels.

OpenRadioss from Altair enjoyed a nice bump from 5.4 to 5.10 and then to 5.15 while with Linux 6.1 its performance is similar to that of last year's LTS kernel.

From WebP image encoding to the LuxCoreRender 3D renderer and 7-Zip compression were among other applications enjoying nice incremental gains in moving to the newer Linux kernel.

But, of course, don't expect all software to magically perform better especially with those primarily limited to user-space interactions.