Linux 6.6 LTS To Linux 7.1 Bechmarks: Performance Up 13% On AMD Threadripper Over Three Years

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 18 May 2026 at 10:30 AM EDT. Page 2 of 8. 9 Comments.
Flexible IO Tester benchmark with settings of Type: Random Read, Engine: IO_uring, Direct: No, Block Size: 4KB, Job Count: 64, Disk Target: Default Test Directory. Linux 7.1 05-14 was the fastest.

With Linux 6.18 LTS and continuing with Linux 7.1 upstream, the random read performance atop the EXT4 file-system and using IO_uring has been enjoying noticeably better performance than the older LTS kernel versions. Very solid improvement for FIO with the random read speed.

RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Read While Writing. Linux 6.18 LTS was the fastest.

The RocksDB database was showing some sizable improvements too in the two newer Linux kernel versions tested.

Apache Cassandra benchmark with settings of Test: Writes. Linux 6.18 LTS was the fastest.

Apache Cassandra similarly showed a nice boost to performance with Linux 6.18 LTS and newer.

Apache CouchDB benchmark with settings of Bulk Size: 300, Inserts: 1000, Rounds: 30. Linux 7.1 05-14 was the fastest.

CouchDB? The best performance running the latest upstream Linux kernel.

Sockperf benchmark with settings of Test: Throughput. Linux 7.1 05-14 was the fastest.

It wasn't just storage I/O benchmarks showing nice gains out of the newer upstream Linux kernel, but Linux 7.1 was also performing quite nicely for local network throughput too as measured by Sockperf.

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