Early benchmarks of the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel show a mix of performance gains and small regressions compared with Linux 7.3 stable. The first tests were run on a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X.
The system also included 128GB of DDR5-5600 memory, a 1TB Crucial NVMe SSD and a Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card. Linux 7.3 was compared with a Linux 7.4 Git build from November 1.
Both kernels were built using the same compiler and default kernel configuration. The testing also monitored CPU power consumption alongside performance. These results represent an initial round of benchmarking, rather than a full assessment of Linux 7.4.
Sources: Phoronix.