Linux 7.2 On Threadripper Shows Some Nice I/O Improvements & Faster Poll, Some Regressions

Earlier in the Linux 7.2 merge window when running some early benchmarks on an AMD EPYC Sorano server, Linux 7.2 was showing much faster poll() performance. The benchmarks on this AMD Ryzen Threadripper system via Stress-NG were also indicating poll now being multiple times faster than on Linux 7.1. This big improvement is potentially due to some scalability work that landed this cycle, as noted in the prior article.

FIO 4K random writes with IO_uring were indicating better performance on Linux 7.2.

There was consistently better performance for the 4K random writes when running on Linux 7.2.

The sequential read performance measured by FIO was also showing some nice improvements out of Linux 7.2 Git.

Sequential write performance was also better off on this PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD workstation using Linux 7.2. EXT4 was the file-system in use.

There were some regressions observed for PostgreSQL read/write performance on this system with Linux 7.2 but in the I/O performance with FIO were some nice performance improvements over Linux 7.1. The poll() performance is also much better on Linux 7.2 -- multiple times better -- and something seen on at least other AMD hardware as well with this new kernel. 3DMark was showing better performance out of the RDNA4-based Radeon AI PRO R9700. Those were the main takeaways from this early round of Linux 7.2 kernel benchmarking. More performance tests on more hardware are forthcoming at Phoronix.