AMD EPYC Server Performance Up ~8% Geo Mean For 2026 With Linux Kernel Improvements

With the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel showing some nice performance improvements over Linux 7.2 in different areas, Linux 7.2 also having brought some nice gains especially for I/O, and the preceding kernels also having seen some nice performance optimizations this year, I wanted to measure how far the Linux kernel performance has evolved so far in 2026. Today's article is looking at that with how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel at the end of 2025 to the current Linux 7.3 kernel. Linux 6.18 debuted at the end of 2025 as the Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version of the year. With Linux 7.3 its stable release will come during the second half of October. Depending upon timing, Linux 7.3 might become this year's LTS kernel version. If Linux 7.3 and 7.4 both are released on schedule, Linux 7.4 should be out before the end of December that in turn may be the last kernel version of 2026 and in turn this year's LTS release. We'll see how it plays out with what Greg Kroah-Hartman decides to declare as the 2026 LTS kernel, in any event Linux 7.3 is the current "latest and greatest" kernel for comparing against Linux 6.18 LTS for representing this year's kernel innovations. Using the same hardware and the same Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base operating system, I compared Linux 6.18.52 to Linux 7.3 Git as of 17 September for measuring the performance and power impact of the upstream Linux kernel improvements so far in 2026. For easy independent reproducibility and those curious about the Kconfig, the kernel builds were obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. For testing based on hardware I had available and not busy with other benchmarks, I used an AMD EPYC 8635P "Sorano" server setup with its 84 Zen 5 cores and 6 x 64GB DDR5 memory and Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD. With this single-socket AMD EPYC Zen 5 server it was then on to running more than 100 Linux server benchmarks for seeing the impact of the Linux kernel releases so far in 2026. Once the 2026 Linux LTS kernel is officially determined at the end of the year, I'll be back around with more benchmarks and on more hardware for better assessing the Linux kernel performance from LTS-to-LTS. Even right now with where things stand on Linux 7.3, there have been some great kernel performance optimizations made this calendar year.