The recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is this year’s Long Term Support version. As such it’s sure to a see a lot of enterprise and hyperscaler uptake in being the annual LTS kernel version. While Linux 6.12 LTS will be maintained at least through the end of next year, upgrading to Linux 6.18 LTS can be very worthwhile from the performance perspective beyond the extended timeline until it will reach end-of-life. Here are benchmarks showing the performance advantages of upgrading from Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.18 LTS for 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” as well as an early look on the same server for the performance direction Linux 6.19 is bringing the kernel into 2026.
Today’s article is looking at the upstream Linux kernel performance evolution on the current-generation AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” series. With AMD EPYC 9005 debuting last year there was already good support in Linux 6.12 LTS for these AMD EPYC Zen 5 server processors but thanks to improvements this year both specific to AMD’s wares as well as general kernel optimizations, there are a number of areas where Linux 6.18 LTS can deliver meaningful performance advantages over last year’s LTS kernel.
On the same AMD EPYC 9755 2P server with 24 x 64GB DDR5 memory, Kioxia PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD, and Ubuntu 25.10 as the base OS, the following kernels were tested with the same hardware and otherwise same software settings:
Linux v6.12: The Linux 6.12 LTS kernel release from last year as the baseline for this testing.
Linux v6.12.62: The very latest Linux 6.12 LTS point release as of testing. This is Linux 6.12 LTS with all the back-ported stable patches over the past year to show if any of the significant performance improvements/fixes made it back into the 6.12 branch.
Linux v6.18: The recently-released Linux 6.18 stable kernel that’s been promoted to being the 2025 LTS kernel.
Linux v6.19 18 Dec: The very latest Linux 6.19 Git state as of yesterday for showing the performance as we head into 2026. Note with Linux 6.19 there have been some performance regressions I previously showcased and bisected but aside from that there are many new features/changes coming in Linux 6.19. The stable Linux 6.19 kernel should be out in February.
From there dozens of different benchmarks were conducted across these different Linux kernel versions on the same AMD EPYC 9755 2P server. The kernel each time was at its defaults besides setting the “performance” CPU frequency scaling governor. The combined 2P CPU power consumption was also monitored on each of the kernel versions too in looking for any power consumption / efficiency changes on the newer kernels.
