Linux 7.2 Showing Some Unexpected & Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC Sorano

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While the Linux 7.2 merge window doesn’t wrap up until this weekend as the feature cut-off for new material, I have already begun some early benchmarks of the code currently staged for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 7.2 already was looking quite exciting with cache aware scheduling and other exciting new features while an unexpected surprise in my early testing this week was seeing some local network/socket performance improvements.

The first system I used for evaluating the early performance of the Linux 7.2 kernel was a server with the new AMD EPYC 8005 “Sorano” series, namely the flagship AMD EPYC 8635P 84 cores / 168 thread Zen 5 processor. Linux 7.2 is looking good on EPYC Sorano and I’ll have a complete overview of the kernel’s performance soon, along with benchmarks on other hardware, but the unexpected surprise for this initial article was finding the localhost network performance to be nicely improved.

Again, stay tuned for more thorough Linux 7.2 benchmarks once the merge window is over while for today is a brief dive into some nice networking performance gains that caught me by surprise.

With comparing Linux 7.1 stable to Linux 7.2 Git as of 21 June, it was a pleasant surprise seeing some unexpected improvements when testing the localhost performance of this EPYC Sorano server using xfr, the modern Rust-based alternative to iperf3:

The TCP performance was improved very nicely. The UDP performance was unchanged over Linux 7.1.

The xfr QUIC test was also showing nice improvements when running on the Linux 7.2 development kernel compared to Linux 7.1 stable. This is great news especially with AMD EPYC 8005 “Sorano” catering to telco, edge computing, cloud storage, and similar environments. It will be interesting to see in the upcoming tests if these improvements carry over similarly on other hardware too.

Outside of xfr, the Sockperf network socket benchmark was showing lower latency too with Linux 7.2.

As a possible…

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