Last week Linux creator Linus Torvalds spotted a bad performance regression with the early Linux 6.8 kernel state that was leading to his kernel build times doubling. Since then kernel developers were working on analyzing the issue and devising a fix . A few minutes ago the fix has worked its way into the mainline kernel.

The merged fix was indeed the one-liner noted in the prior Phoronix article around the kernel scheduler's behavior when using the ACPI CPUFreq driver with the Schedutil governor.

The one line change applies a 25% margin so that the kernel selects a higher frequency than the current one before the CPU is fully utilized.

The fix has been merged so on older AMD systems using ACPI CPUFreq Schedutil and elsewhere, Linux 6.8 should no longer regress the performance -- unless there are other performance regressions lurking this merge window.