The Performance Benefits Of Linux 6.12 LTS Over Linux 6.6 LTS

Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.

Linux 6.12 features are aplenty on their own right with the changes compared to the prior v6.11, but even more significant for those sticking to annual LTS kernel versions… Going from Linux 6.6 to Linux 6.12 means now having mainline support for sched_ext, real-time “PREEMPT_RT” kernel support finally being mainlined after many years in the works, a lot of new hardware support from laptops/desktops to servers, the Intel Xe driver was upstreamed as the modern alternative to the i915 driver for Intel graphics, dropping SLAB, many network improvements, Intel IA-64 being retired, more FUTEX2 work, many AMD P-State improvements, the Rust toolchain within the Linux kernel becoming stabilized, getrandom() in the vDSO support, TPM bus encryption, Intel FRED being firmed up, the DRM panic infrastructure, and plenty of performance optimizations across the board.

On the hardware side there is Intel Xe2 graphics support, AMD RDNA4 enablement, a lot of AMD Zen 5 platform enablement, improvements for the latest Intel desktop/server/laptop hardware as well as prepping for Panther Lake and Clearwater forest, and much more… Far too much to easily summarize in a concise manner.

For this round of Linux 6.6 vs. Linux 6.12 kernel benchmarking I had to use a 1+ year old platform for ensuring reliable hardware support back on v6.6. I ended up using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X via the System76 Thelio Major given the number of workstation-type users relying on LTS kernels within render farms, CI / CD farms, and Threadrippers being an interesting mix of relevance to both desktop and server workloads.

The System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X was running with 128GB of RAM, Radeon graphics, and tested on an Ubuntu 24.04 base. The only change-out between the test runs was swapping out the kernel in use with both the Linux 6.6 LTS and Linux 6.12 LTS kernel images obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for easy reproducibility/comparison.