Early Benchmarks Of AMD EPYC On Linux 7.3 Show Some Performance Gains On The Horizon

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 2 September 2026 at 11:53 AM EDT. Page 3 of 4. Add A Comment.
Flexible IO Tester benchmark with settings of Type: Random Read, Engine: IO_uring, Direct: Yes, Block Size: 4KB, Job Count: 1, Disk Target: Default Test Directory. Linux 7.3-rc1 was the fastest.

With FIO there were some gains out of running on Linux 7.3 for this AMD EPYC server with PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage. While using the EXT4 file-system that didn't see any major file-system performance optimizations this round and unchanged with the earlier tests I ran last week, one change that comes to mind are the PCIe Gen5 NVMe optimizations. In particular, addressing a significant bottleneck for small I/O with Gen5 NVMe SSDs made it into Linux 7.3.

Flexible IO Tester benchmark with settings of Type: Random Write, Engine: IO_uring, Direct: Yes, Block Size: 4KB, Job Count: 1, Disk Target: Default Test Directory. Linux 7.3-rc1 was the fastest.
Flexible IO Tester benchmark with settings of Type: Random Write, Engine: IO_uring, Direct: Yes, Block Size: 4KB, Job Count: 64, Disk Target: Default Test Directory. Linux 7.3-rc1 was the fastest.
Flexible IO Tester benchmark with settings of Type: Sequential Write, Engine: IO_uring, Direct: Yes, Block Size: 4MB, Job Count: 64, Disk Target: Default Test Directory. Linux 7.3-rc1 was the fastest.

It was nice seeing some more performance gains out of Linux 7.3 in these I/O tests considering Linux 7.2 had already delivered on some healthy improvements too over Linux 7.1.

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