Performance

How close Linux gets to the hardware, measured on one tablet in October 2026, mostly against Android on the same tablet. Single runs: expect a few percent between runs. Linux: Debian 13 with GNOME, Open Device Helper defaults.

Summary#

Against published Android results#

Where the same benchmark runs on both, Linux on this tablet against results published for other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices (Android):

With Debian's Mesa 26.1.6, Geekbench 6 OpenCL fails one workload's result check (Particle Physics) and scores 2593. Graphics (GravityMark) lands where an Adreno 840 should be, above the Adreno 830 phones. With the distribution's Mesa the loss is in GPU compute (Geekbench's OpenCL and Vulkan compute workloads), not across the board; the project's Mesa build closes it (see GPU).

CPU and memory#

Two kernel changes closed most of the CPU gap:

• Patch 0117 gives the scheduler the two core sizes. Before it, all eight cores looked the same and a busy single thread could stay on a small core (Geekbench 6 single-core 2288 → 3590).
• Patches 0120-0127 (Qualcomm's memlat series, pending upstream) start the memory-latency governor in the CPU control firmware. Without it, DDR stays at a low clock while the CPU waits on memory with little bandwidth in use, and random memory access takes twice as long as on Android.

Earlier Geekbench 6 runs on Linux: 2288 / 10359 (before 0117), 3590 / 11016 (with 0117), 3572 / 10857 (kernel-t40). Android results published for this tablet are about 3655–3710 / 10758–11672.

Per workload (Geekbench 7, memlat kernel against Android on the same tablet), single-core is uniformly about 97 % of Android. Multi-core is level except three long all-core workloads: Asset Compression 83 %, Clang 89 %, Ray Tracer 91 %. During them all eight cores are busy while the clocks fall within a second or two to 2.0–2.9 GHz (small cores, 3.63 GHz maximum) and 2.7–3.1 GHz (large cores, 4.61 GHz) at about 100 °C; the operating system reports no throttling, so the limit comes from the firmware. Whether Android sustains higher clocks there has not been measured yet.

GPU#

The GPU itself runs as it should: clocks up to 1200 MHz (Android's limit too), FP32 3.05 TFLOPS and 66 GB/s measured with clpeak. Graphics (OpenGL) go through the distribution's Mesa (freedreno). For Vulkan and OpenCL compute the project provides its own Mesa build (Turnip and rusticl for the Adreno 840): installed next to the distribution's Mesa through Open Device Helper (Performance → Graphics Drivers, or tb323fu-ctl mesa update), or downloaded from the project's mesa-* releases. See Graphics drivers.

Default GPU clock settings (performance profile), no clock pinning. Measured on one tablet (the author's): for orientation only, results on other units may differ. With Debian's Mesa, OpenCL was the weak spot (39 % of Android in Geekbench 7); the cause was in Mesa's OpenCL and compute paths, not in the kernel. The project's build is checked against OpenCL-CTS and the Vulkan CTS (dEQP-VK) groups that cover compute and synchronization, with the same results as upstream Mesa.

Storage#

UFS 4.1, fio with io_uring, an 8 GB file, direct I/O, 20 s per test (the commands are under Running it yourself). Linux: kernel-t42, the median of four runs. Android: measured earlier with the same engine and file size, but options that were not recorded; not measured again.

Patch 0119 turns on the controller's multi-queue mode (MCQ). With the same commands, kernel-t40 (without 0119 and the memlat patches 0120-0127) does 8.5k random reads at QD1 and 178k with 4 jobs. In kernel-t42 the MCQ state was lost over suspend: after each resume the controller went through an error reset, ran on without its per-queue interrupts (about 254k with 4 jobs) and now and then failed to resume. Patch 0128 (from kernel-t43) keeps that state, so the numbers above hold after suspend too. The I/O engine matters at low queue depth: libaio is slower than io_uring at QD1. An earlier version of this page gave 16.1k and 448k for Linux; those came from fio options that were not recorded, and the kernel they were measured on gives the numbers above with these commands.

Running it yourself#

./geekbench7 --cpu                                   # Geekbench 7 Linux AArch64 preview
sudo apt install ocl-icd-libopencl1 clinfo clpeak    # the OpenCL loader; the driver comes from the project's Mesa
tb323fu-mesa run ./geekbench7 --gpu OpenCL          # with the project's Mesa (or log in again after `tb323fu-ctl mesa on`)
tb323fu-mesa run clpeak
sudo apt install tinymembench fio
tinymembench                                         # copy bandwidth; latency in the 67108864 row
F=/var/tmp/fio.dat                                   # storage: 8 GB test file, written first
fio --name=prep --filename=$F --size=8G --rw=write --bs=1M --direct=1 --ioengine=io_uring --iodepth=32
fio --name=t --filename=$F --size=8G --direct=1 --ioengine=io_uring --runtime=20 --time_based \
    --group_reporting --rw=randread --bs=4k --iodepth=1 --numjobs=1
#   sequential: --rw=read|write --bs=1M --iodepth=32; random: --rw=randread|randwrite --bs=4k
#   with --iodepth=1, --iodepth=32, or --iodepth=32 --numjobs=4
rm $F

The Geekbench preview builds need an Internet connection and upload every result to the Geekbench Browser. Close other programs and keep the tablet on a charger with Bypass charging off.