Intel spots a single line of code that sees Linux gain a massive nearly 40 times or 4000% performance gain.
There are essentially two ways technology, including computing, makes progress, it is either by boosting performance or by improving efficiency. Any and all such optimizations are welcomed by the community.
Speaking of optimization, an Intel kernel testing bot recently spotted a massive performance improvement in the Linux kernel achieved on a single line of code commit. A whopping 3889% or nearly 40 times faster throughput was seen on «will-it-scale» scaling test during 1-byte memory allocation (malloc1). The test was done on a 4-socket Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H (Cooper Lake) bed for 224 threads in total (each 8380H chip is a 28-core 56-thread SKU).
kernel test robot noticed a 3888.9% improvement of will-it-scale.per_process_ops on:
commit: d4148aeab412432bf928f311eca8a2ba52bb05df («mm, mmap: limit THP alignment of anonymous mappings to PMD-aligned sizes»)
In addition, it also saw «significant impact» on Sapphire Rapids Xeon® Platinum 8480+ during stress-ng.
