Beyond packing many exciting new features and changes, Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version. Assuming the Linux 6.18 LTS designation, this next kernel version will see lots of use in enterprise environments and thus recently carried out some AMD EPYC 9965 2P “Turin” benchmarks between Linux 6.17 stable and the Linux 6.18 development kernel state.
The AMD EPYC 9965 2P testing of Linux 6.17 vs. 6.18 Git using the same kernel configuration and compiler were recently carried out in being curious around the new kernel’s performance. Linux 6.18 has also been running well on Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids and thus eager to “kick the tires” for Linux 6.18 on AMD EPYC Turin.
With the initial benchmarks, there are some performance improvements that were observed when running this AMD EPYC 9965 dual socket server on Linux 6.18 but also a few cases of some performance regressions.
A number of the OpenJDK Java workloads were showing measurable and consistent gains when running on Linux 6.18 in its development form relative to Linux 6.17 stable.
Across various other workloads, there were some incremental wins to note for different applications when running on Linux 6.18 with this AMD 5th Gen EPYC server.
Code compilation build times though were clocking in slightly lower than when running off a Linux 6.17 kernel. Aside from that though there weren’t any other significant performance drops observed in the 200+ benchmarks ran in total on this high-end AMD EPYC server. Further testing as time allows will see if it’s an isolated issue with the code compilation speed to this server or some Linux 6.18 change affecting build speeds more broadly. In any event Linux 6.18 has been running well on the AMD EPYC Turin benchmarks thus far.
