Linux 5.11 is out with AMD and Intel improvements

cybertech · February 2021

The version arrived on Sunday's Valentine's Day with only a small amount of changes from the previous seventh release candidate (RC). It's been in development since before December and brings support for Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), a hardware-isolated trusted execution environment for applications to store and process secrets in enclaves.

As noted by Linux news site Phoronix, SGX support in the Linux kernel has taken years to achieve. Linux 5.11 also brings better AMD performance and power-management support for AMD's Zen-based CPUs, thanks to patches from Google engineers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-5-11-is-out-with-amd-and-intel-improvements-and-linus-torvalds-is-happy/

cybertech · February 2021

Which provider has upgraded their nodes to 5.11?

Neoon · February 2021

@cybertech said:
Which provider has upgraded their nodes to 5.11?

OVZ likely not in the next 5 years.
KVM maybe
other no idea

Proxmox uses 5.4 from Ubuntu 20.04, maybe when Ubuntu 22.04 gets released in 2022 Proxmox may bump to 5.11 or higher.
Debian 11 this year comes with 5.10, but no idea who uses that as Node.

Not_Oles · February 2021

@cybertech said:
Which provider has upgraded their nodes to 5.11?

@cybertech We could put 5.11 on my AX51-NVME. Or OpenBSD current. How about it?

Not_Oles · February 2021

@cybertech

I just found out about https://github.com/fabianishere/pve-edge-kernel

Maybe I can do something? Dunno yet.

dahartigan · February 2021

I installed 5.11 on my proxmox a couple of days ago and it made a gigantic improvement to stability.

@Not_Oles that's the exact kernel I'm using, from that git. I'd say go for it imo.

EDIT: Linux 5.11.0-2 #1 SMP 5.11.0-2 zen2 (Thu, 18 Feb 2021 10:45:32 +0000)
pve-manager/6.3-3/eee5f901

cybertech · February 2021

@dahartigan said:
I installed 5.11 on my proxmox a couple of days ago and it made a gigantic improvement to stability.

@Not_Oles that's the exact kernel I'm using, from that git. I'd say go for it imo.

EDIT: Linux 5.11.0-2 #1 SMP 5.11.0-2 zen2 (Thu, 18 Feb 2021 10:45:32 +0000)
pve-manager/6.3-3/eee5f901

on a node or VPS?

dahartigan · February 2021

@cybertech said:

@dahartigan said:
I installed 5.11 on my proxmox a couple of days ago and it made a gigantic improvement to stability.

@Not_Oles that's the exact kernel I'm using, from that git. I'd say go for it imo.

EDIT: Linux 5.11.0-2 #1 SMP 5.11.0-2 zen2 (Thu, 18 Feb 2021 10:45:32 +0000)
pve-manager/6.3-3/eee5f901

on a node or VPS?

On a VPS.

Not_Oles · February 2021

Yeah, 5.11.1-1 seems to work on a VPS. Will mess around some more on the VPS, then maybe try it on the node. Still waiting for one neighbor to say yes. He will.

debian@debian-kvm:~$ uname -a
Linux debian-kvm 5.11.2-1 #1 SMP 5.11.2-1 zen2 (Fri, 26 Feb 2021 16:42:01 +0000) x86_64 GNU/Linux
debian@debian-kvm:~$

Neoon · February 2021

5.11 should run fine in KVM, just at the node you may run into issues.
I have no idea how stable the edge kernel is and how often you need to patch it.

You won't have kernel care or such.

seriesn · February 2021

@Neoon said: 5.11 should run fine in KVM, just at the node you may run into issues.

It has some weird issue with freebsd guest (KVM). But besides that, pretty solid

Not_Oles · February 2021

When I previously posted yabs running on the AX101 bare metal the single core GB5 score was 1719. This was with whatever kernel was on stable Proxmox just before 5.4.98-1-pve, which seems to be what is running on the metal right now -- the kernel having been updated once a few days ago.

I ran yabs inside a KVM. The kernel in the KVM was updated to the latest Proxmox-edge-kernel, 5.11.2-1-pve. The single core score was 1736.

I will post the yabs in the official yabs thread.

Looks pretty good, but maybe I goofed somewhere. . . .

dahartigan · February 2021

The biggest improvement I noticed is the stability inside a KVM with a high vCPU count. It seems like the power management changes were the key here. IIRC changing the max cstates to 1 previously was a workaround pre-5.11, but running with defaults has been working flawlessly since upgrading to 5.11

cybertech · February 2021

@dahartigan said:
The biggest improvement I noticed is the stability inside a KVM with a high vCPU count. It seems like the power management changes were the key here. IIRC changing the max cstates to 1 previously was a workaround pre-5.11, but running with defaults has been working flawlessly since upgrading to 5.11

I did not notice much difference with KVM 4 core Ryzen from AlphaVPS and figured it might make more difference on the node itself.

that's coming from 5.10 though. proxmox uses 5.4 (again pointing to the node)

dahartigan · February 2021

@cybertech said:

@dahartigan said:
The biggest improvement I noticed is the stability inside a KVM with a high vCPU count. It seems like the power management changes were the key here. IIRC changing the max cstates to 1 previously was a workaround pre-5.11, but running with defaults has been working flawlessly since upgrading to 5.11

I did not notice much difference with KVM 4 core Ryzen from AlphaVPS and figured it might make more difference on the node itself.

that's coming from 5.10 though. proxmox uses 5.4 (again pointing to the node)

I went from the stock pve 5.4 kernel to the 5.11 and that jump solved my issues, but I suspect the newer kernel would be more noticeable for people like me who run proxmox inside a KVM, maybe less effect on bare metal? I haven't tried anything on any bare metal Ryzen so no experience to share there.

Neoon · February 2021

@seriesn said:

@Neoon said: 5.11 should run fine in KVM, just at the node you may run into issues.

It has some weird issue with freebsd guest (KVM). But besides that, pretty solid

No one here is using freebsd.

cybertech · February 2021

@dahartigan said:

@cybertech said:

@dahartigan said:
The biggest improvement I noticed is the stability inside a KVM with a high vCPU count. It seems like the power management changes were the key here. IIRC changing the max cstates to 1 previously was a workaround pre-5.11, but running with defaults has been working flawlessly since upgrading to 5.11

I did not notice much difference with KVM 4 core Ryzen from AlphaVPS and figured it might make more difference on the node itself.

that's coming from 5.10 though. proxmox uses 5.4 (again pointing to the node)

I went from the stock pve 5.4 kernel to the 5.11 and that jump solved my issues, but I suspect the newer kernel would be more noticeable for people like me who run proxmox inside a KVM, maybe less effect on bare metal? I haven't tried anything on any bare metal Ryzen so no experience to share there.

hmmm then it would make sense, less performance loss using proxmox.

Not_Oles · February 2021

Sat 27 Feb 2021 06:23:39 PM UTC

Node rebooted into 5.11.2

Not_Oles · February 2021

Single core GB5 at 1673. Down slightly from 1719.

Ideas?

Not_Oles · February 2021

Rerunning yabs. Same setup as above, kernel 5.11.2 from fabianishere running on Hetzner AX101 bare metal. GB5 single core slightly up: first run was1673, now 1725.

Not_Oles · February 2021

Test results:

Geekbench 5 scores
(AX101 Ryzen 9 5950X, Linux kernel 5.11.2)

Virtualization	GB5 Score
Bare metal	1725
KVM	1454
LXC	1489

Linux 5.11 is out with AMD and Intel improvements

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