When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core Ultra X7 “Panther Lake” in being hopeful for better performance with the maturing Arc B390 Xe3 graphics and the like. But I ended up finding Intel Panther Lake seeing some performance regressions on Linux 7.0. So next up I turned to an AMD EPYC Turin server since if regressions existed there at least it’s much faster to carry out bisecting of the kernel performance regressions. But with that initial testing wrapped up, I didn’t find any regressions like with Panther Lake and standing out were some rather enticing PostgreSQL database server performance benefits when running atop Linux 7.0.
For this initial testing of Linux 7.0 on AMD EPYC Turin, I ran benchmarks comparing Linux 6.19 stable against Linux 7.0 Git as of the current development state on 19 February. The merge window is settling down and one of many planned Linux 7.0 benchmarks to come leading up to the stable kernel release in April. Both Linux 6.19 and 7.0 Git were built with the same kernel configuration options and the same compiler toolchain. In fact, the kernel binaries all built off the same Panther Lake laptop from the earlier tests this week.
For this AMD EPYC Turin server tests an AMD EPYC 9755 1P setup was used with the new Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 server build. As with the same software besides the kernel swap, the same hardware was obviously used for both kernel runs in the same configuration.
With all that said, let’s dive in to see what I am seeing from the initial Linux 7.0 performance testing on AMD EPYC 9005 series.
