One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil.

Following the Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarks on AMD EPYC and it showing the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel regressing in some workloads, bisecting that issue, and that bringing up the issue of the performance regression over page lock fairness a solution for Linux 5.9 has now landed.

Last week we reported on a Linux 5.9 kernel regression following benchmarks from Linux 5.0 to 5.9 and there being a sharp drop with the latest development kernel. That kernel regression was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds at the start of the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem and one still being analyzed in coming up with a proper solution. So the short story is it's a work-in-progress while this article has some additional insight and benchmarks done over the course of the past few days.

The Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarking posted this week showed TensorFlow Lite running slower since the Linux 5.5 kernel... On top of looking at the new Linux 5.9 regressions, I also spent some time bisecting and figuring out what happened for TensorFlow Lite last year that has at least for the system under test caused it to run slower for all the kernel releases this year as shown in the aforelinked article.

Recently carrying out some benchmarks of all major kernel releases from Linux 5.0 through Linux 5.9 ended up yielding some surprising performance changes with the in-development 5.9 kernel. Here's details on this historical look at the kernel performance and what's going on with the Linux 5.9 kernel slowdowns.

Following the debut of the big Blender 2.90 release and subsequently updating it for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org, here is a deep dive into the Blender 2.90 performance... A number of areas are being looked at with the initial Blender 2.90 benchmarks from how the performance is on various CPUs and GPUs to the performance of the Blender 2.82 vs. 2.90 to looking at the Windows vs. Linux performance for Blender 2.90 with various means of acceleration.

At the end of June AMD quietly released a new version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. Noticing the new release this week, here are some benchmarks of AOCC 2.2 up against LLVM Clang 10 and GCC 10 with Ubuntu Linux while running from an AMD EPYC 7742 2P server for looking at the performance gains possible with the compiler optimizations.

As alluded to previously, a major overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org has been in the works for a number of months now including a completely brand new analytics engine as part of the Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 development with its release due out later this year. With the new OpenBenchmarking.org now in good enough shape at least for the internal infrastructure, this new version is being opened up to the public today while over the weeks ahead more features will continue to be flipped on.

Linux 5.9-rc1 is set to be released this evening in marking the end of the two-week long merge window where new features are introduced for the cycle.

The FSGSBASE support that was finally mainlined a few days ago for Linux 5.9 is off to providing a nice performance boost for both Intel and AMD systems. Looking at FSGSBASE is one of the first areas I've dived into for Linux 5.9 kernel testing with this article serving as some preview/teaser data points.

With the Intel Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor here are some fresh GCC compiler benchmarks when looking at the performance of GCC 8.4 versus 9.3 versus a 10.2 snapshot while testing with optimization flags of -O2, -O3 -march=native, and -O3 -march=native -flto.

Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 is available today as the latest quarterly stable feature release to our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software.

Back in March I benchmarked the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) as a means of achieving additional security safeguards for a ~5% performance hit. With LKRG 0.8 having been released a few days ago, here is a fresh look at the LKRG performance compared to the stock kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

One of the security improvements being worked on in recent months by Intel's open-source team has been FGKASLR. But how is the performance overhead compared to just traditional KASLR? Here are benchmarks looking at the performance impact of FGKASLR on top, just KASLR, and then no address space layout randomization.

Slated for Linux 5.9 is finally mainlining the FSGSBASE patches that have been floating around the kernel mailing list for years. Testing last week showed the tentative x86/fsgsbase patches helping Intel Xeon Linux performance but with AMD also supporting this instruction set extension going back to Bulldozer, how is it looking on the likes of AMD? Here are some benchmarks.

After covering the Linux patches for FSGSBASE for years, it's looking like Linux 5.9 will finally land the support for this CPU capability present since Ivy Bridge on the Intel side and more recently on AMD CPUs with Bulldozer and Zen. Here are benchmarks looking at some of the performance benefits the Linux FSGSBASE patches can provide for an Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh server.

Linus Torvalds is expected to release Linux 5.8-rc1 following the two week long Linux 5.8 kernel merge window. Here is our overview of all the big changes coming with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Following yesterday's disclosure of CrossTalk / SRBDS after a nearly two year embargo period for this Special Register Buffer Data Sampling vulnerability, I have been running benchmarks on multiple systems for the past nearly 24 hours. Here are some preliminary data points for both synthetic and real-world workloads on various Intel CPUs before/after mitigating SRBDS with the updated Intel microcode.

This morning I noted CrossTalk / SRBDS as the newest side-channel vulnerability following Intel's monthly security advisories being sent out. It turns out Intel broke their own embargo on the disclosure and I happened to spot it quickly before they retracted it. In the hours since, the university researchers behind this CrossTalk vulnerability reached out and have provided an embargoed copy of the whitepaper. As of now, the formal disclosure time has passed so information on this new side-channel Intel CPU vulnerability is public and it shows for the first time that speculative execution can enable attackers to leak sensitive information across physical cores on Intel CPUs.

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.

With the PHP 8.0 schedule putting the first alpha release for the middle of June, I've been trying out its latest Git state in recent days for looking at its performance as well as when enabling its brand new JIT (Just In Time) compiler support that is new to PHP8. The results are quite compelling and here are metrics going back to the days of PHP 5.4 for comparison.

Given the release last week of GraalVM 20.1 as well as last month's release of Eclipse OpenJ9 0.20, here are some fresh JVM benchmarks up against multiple OpenJDK releases.

We delivered many benchmarks of Clang 10.0 on various CPUs following that updated LLVM compiler stack release earlier this year. With GCC 10 released earlier this month, we have begun our benchmarking of this annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. First up is a look at the GCC 9 vs. GCC 10 vs. LLVM Clang 10 compiler performance on AMD Zen 2 and Intel Cascade Lake systems.

FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been available for years albeit not mainlined to date. However, thankfully, a Microsoft Linux developer has taken up the cause to get them upstreamed given the performance benefits they are even seeing. Here are some benchmarks of the Linux kernel patches for FSGSBASE on both Intel and AMD CPUs.

Following new Intel Ice Lake CPU microcode being published on Friday without any change-log and not updating prior Intel CPU family microcodes, I've begun looking at the performance as this first Intel CPU microcode update for Linux users since November. From my initial weekend testing there does seem to be some small but measurable and consistent performance impairments for Ice Lake from this microcode upgrade.

OpenCL 3.0 is being released today in provisional form. OpenCL 3.0 is making OpenCL 2.x functionality now optional to make it better suited for a range of devices plus there is new functionality introduced like subgroups, extensions for asynchronous data copies, and more.

Earlier this month I looked at the X.Org vs. Wayland browser performance with Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla Firefox in particular was showing better performance on Wayland, so here are fresh tests of Firefox with using Fedora 32 and testing various X.Org/Wayland desktops.

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.

Linus Torvalds is expected to deliver an Easter day kernel release in the form of Linux 5.7-rc1. After a two week merge window, Linux 5.7 feature development formally ends today. Here is a look at the many exciting improvements and new features to find with Linux 5.7.

Given the release of Firefox 75 with Wayland improvements and also Firefox 76 now being in beta with even more work on the Wayland front, here are some web browser benchmarks under Wayland and the X.Org Server session with GNOME Shell 3.36 on Ubuntu 20.04. Additionally, Google Chrome benchmarks on Wayland and X.Org were also carried out.