General System Tweaks

1. Reduce Swappiness and vfs_cache_pressure

The system’s swap space preference can be adjusted using the vm.swappiness sysctl parameter. The default value is “30”, which means that the kernel will avoid swapping processes to disk as much as possible and will instead try to keep as much data as possible in memory. A lower swappiness value generally leads to improved performance but may lead to decreased stability if the system runs out of memory.

The vm.vfs_cache_pressure is a kernel parameter that sets the tendency of the kernel to reclaim inode and dentry cache. By default, it is set to “100” and a lower value means the kernel will tend to cache more inode and dentry information in memory. To improve performance, you can try to lower the value of vm.vfs_cache_pressure to improve file system performance by having more file system metadata cached in memory.

Both values can be changed in the /etc/sysctl.d/99-cachyos-settings.conf file.

2. Zram or Zswap tweaking

Zswap is a kernel feature that caches swap pages in RAM, compressing them before storing. It improves performance by reducing disk I/O when the system needs to swap. Zram is a RAM-based swap device that does not require a backing swap device.

For zswap, use the following recommended configurations:

echo zstd > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor
echo 10 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/max_pool_percent

To make the changes persistent, add zswap.compressor=zstd zswap.max_pool_percent=10 to your bootloader’s kernel command line options

For SSDs, set the page-cluster value to 1 in /etc/sysctl.d/99-cachyos-settings.conf. For HDDs, set it to 2.

3. CPU Mitigations for retbleed

A public speculative execution attack exploiting return instructions (retbleed) was revealed in July 2022. The kernel has fixed this, but it results in a significant performance regression (14-39%).

The following CPU’s are affected:

AMD: Zen 1, Zen 1+, Zen 2
Intel: 6th to 8th Generation, Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake

Check which mitigations your CPU is affected by using: grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*

Disabling mitigations

While disabling the mitigations increases performance, it also introduces security risks.

Add the following to your kernel command line: retbleed=off or to disable all mitigations: mitigations=off

Edit the appropriate file to make the changes persistent:

GRUB: /etc/default/grub
systemd boot: /etc/sdboot-manage.conf
rEFInd: /boot/refind_linux.conf

For more information:

Downfall

Downfall is characterized as a vulnerability due to a memory optimization feature that unintentionally reveals internal hardware registers to software. With Downfall, untrusted software can access data stored by other programs that typically should be off-limits: the AVX GATHER instruction can leak the contents of the internal vector register file during speculative execution. Downfall was discovered by security researcher Daniel Moghimi of Google. Moghimi has written demo code for Downfall to show 128-bit and 256-bit AES keys being stolen from other users on the local system as well as the ability to steal arbitrary data from the Linux kernel.

This affects the following CPU generations:

Skylake
Tiger Lake
Ice Lake

Disabling Downfall

Add gather_data_sampling=off to your kernel cmdline options. mitigations=off will also disable downfall.

4. AMD P-State Driver

For improved performance and power efficiency, you can enable the AMD P-State EPP driver. The default AMD P-State driver may not provide the same benefits as the acpi-cpufreq driver.

Add one of the following options to your kernel command line:

AMD P-State: amd_pstate=passive
AMD P-State-GUIDED: amd_pstate=guided
AMD P-State EPP: amd_pstate=active

You can switch between modes at runtime to test the options:

echo active | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/amd_pstate/status - Autonomous mode, platform considers only the values set for Minimum performance, Maximum performance, and Energy Performance Preference.
echo guided | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/amd_pstate/status - Guided-autonomous mode, platform sets operating performance level according to the current workload and within limits set by the OS through minimum and maximum performance registers.
echo passive | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/amd_pstate/status - Non-autonomous mode, platform gets desired performance level from OS directly through Desired Performance Register.

For more information:

5. Using AMD P-State EPP

To use the P-State EPP, there are two CPU frequency scaling governors available: powersave and performance. It is recommended to use the powersave governor and set a preference.

Set powersave governor: sudo cpupower frequency-set -g powersave
Set performance governor: sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

To set a preference, run the following command with the desired preference:

echo power | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference

Available preferences: performance, power, balance_power, balance_performance

Benchmarks for each preference can be found here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

6. AMD P-State Preferred Core Handling

AMD Pstate driver will provide an initial core ordering at boot time. It relies on the CPPC interface to communicate the core ranking to the operating system and scheduler to make sure that OS is choosing the cores with highest performance firstly for scheduling the process. When AMD Pstate driver receives a message with the highest performance change, it will update the core ranking.

This can result into a better performance and process handling. More information here: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pm/[email protected]/

The AMD P-State Preferred Core Handling is now enabled by default.

You can use the following command to check if your CPU supports it:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/amd_pstate/prefcore

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/amd_pstate/status

to see if it is enabled

7. Disabling Split Lock Mitigate

In some cases, split lock mitigate can slow down performance in some applications and games. A patch is available to disable it via sysctl.

Disable split lock mitigate: sudo sysctl kernel.split_lock_mitigate=0
Enable split lock mitigate: sudo sysctl kernel.split_lock_mitigate=1

To make the change persistent, add the following line to /etc/sysctl.d/99-splitlock.conf:

kernel.split_lock_mitigate=0

For more information on split lock, see: