• Linux 7.0 Showing Some Early Performance Regressions On Intel Panther Lake With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. • Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong direction with the early Linux 7.0 benchmarking. • I was eager to begin Linux 7.0 kernel testing to look out for any CPU or iGPU performance improvements with the Core Ultra X7 358H and its Arc B390 Graphics. • Especially with the Intel Xe driver continuing to mature for the new Xe3 graphics I was hopeful of seeing some improvements for the exciting B390 graphics but overall the performance was regressing over Linux 6.19 stable. • Using the same MSI Prestige 14 Panther Lake laptop (in its “performance” platform profile consistently as recommended by Intel) with the Core Ultra X7 358H and 32GB of LPDDR5-8533 memory, I ran benchmarks on Linux 6.19 stable and Linux 7.0 Git as of 16 February. • The same compiler toolchain on that laptop and the same basic kernel configuration (all new Kconfig additions in v7.0 at their default values).
Article Summaries:
- Linux kernel 7.0 has revealed early performance regressions on Intel’s new Panther Lake platform. Benchmarks run on an MSI Prestige 14 laptop equipped with a Core Ultra X7 358H and Arc B390 graphics show slower performance compared to Linux 6.19 stable. The tests used identical hardware, memory, compiler toolchain, and kernel configuration (with default 7.0 Kconfig options), isolating the kernel as the variable. The author notes that further testing on other systems is underway to determine whether the regressions are specific to Panther Lake or indicative of broader 7.0 issues. Results will be reported as the merge window closes.
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