Linux by default is meant for servers and actually decreases the performance for greater security. While this great in business, when using Linux as a desktop it is not ideal unless your are serving other devices on your network with that machine.

Disable Mitigations

This will have a substantial increase in performance just by doing disable many mitigations that happen in multi-threaded systems. The more core count you have the greater the performance gain. Some performances increases can be as large as 30%, but the average increase is about 10%.

Add this to your /etc/default/grub under line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet":

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet mitigations=off"

ZSwap for 16GB or Less Systems

Z Swap is the a neat Linux feature that compresses data that is about to enter your swap file. This causes it to be used quite a bit less and can give a performance uplift to those with a small amount of memory. If you have a system with 32GB or greater, I wouldn’t recommend doing this.

Add this to your /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="zswap.enabled=1 rhgb quiet mitigations=off"

Systems older than Linux 5.11

There is a cool website called https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ that has a massive amount of the flags including the ones used above. However, this is mainly for older Linux installs and why I really don’t use it. These are all the flags that website recommends:

noibrs noibpb nopti nospectre_v2 nospectre_v1 l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier mds=off tsx=on tsx_async_abort=off mitigations=off

Is this really needed?

While all this above isn’t really needed, it is a really neat way to squeeze a bit performance out of your systems. It is ONLY recommended for those not sharing services and files through your network. It is also NOT recommended for those using Linux in a virtual machine as many of the mitigations are for VM protection. So use this RESPONSIBLY and don’t just slap it on every Linux install.

Walkthrough Video