Michael Larabel’s initial comparison found some performance gains and small regressions when testing Linux 7.4 Git against Linux 7.3 stable on one workstation. The Git snapshot was dated November 1, 2026; Phoronix published the report on November 4. In the tested OpenGL and Vulkan workloads, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 showed no observed performance difference.
The workstation behind the comparison
The test ran on a System76 Thelio Major with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X, 4 × 32 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, a 1 TB Crucial NVMe SSD and Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics. Phoronix used the same compiler and default kernel configuration for both builds, and monitored CPU power consumption.
For context on the baseline, NeoTeo’s earlier report on Linux 7.3 benchmarks covers a separate comparison involving that kernel version.
Graphics performance and an AMDGPU feature
The OpenGL and Vulkan results apply to the workloads tested on the Radeon AI PRO R9700. The report also noted that Linux 7.4 enabled HDMI 2.1 support by default in the AMDGPU kernel driver. That is a driver functionality change, distinct from the graphics performance measurements.
A separate slab benchmark
A separate Linux 7.4 slab-update result concerned memory management, not the Threadripper comparison. Linux.org summarized the benchmark, and a Phoronix chart showed throughput rising from 27,778,727 to 34,500,556 operations, marked as a 24.2% increase.
The chart identifies the workload as will-it-scale mmap1 with the maple_node cache, 192 processes and one-minute runs. The 24.2% result applies to that specific workload.
