Linux 6.9 Drives AMD 4th Gen EPYC Performance Even Higher For Some Workloads

Now that the Linux 6.9 merge window is past I've begun testing out this in-development kernel on more hardware platforms in the lab. While some performance boosts like Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" running faster on Linux 6.9 was to be expected given EPP tuning in the new kernel specific to those SoCs, one of the unexpected delights has been seeing AMD 4th Gen EPYC performance with some nice performance gains over Linux 6.8 stable.

Running a Linux 6.9 Git kernel this week on the AMD Titanite 2P reference server paired with dual AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X processors has shown off some nice incremental performance improvements compared to Linux 6.8 stable. This was a bit of a surprise given I don't recall seeing any AMD EPYC specific performance optimizations in Linux 6.8 but there is the ever ongoing general performance tuning work and other generic kernel optimizations. I'm currently running similar tests on the Intel Xeon Scalable side as well to see how it's looking for Linux 6.9.

In any event given the already leading performance of the AMD EPYC 9004 series server and HPC performance, it's great seeing Linux 6.9 continuing to move the performance needle in the right direction. This is also on top of various AMD performance optimizations seen over the course of the Linux kernel releases over the past year or so.

Today's article is the initial look at the AMD EPYC 9004 series performance on Linux 6.9 Git vs. 6.8 stable using the AMD EPYC 9684X 2P server running Ubuntu 23.10. The only change between benchmark runs was switching out the Linux kernel being used. The kernel images were obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for easy reproducibility.