I just compiled and am running a 5.16.0 Linux kernel. I had been running 5.13.19, because 5.14 was unstable (crashed if you looked at it wrong) and 5.15 was as slow as molasses in liquid helium, audio skipped, graphics performance was not great, system load was high and most CPU cycles were spent in kernel time. It seemed to have severe issues with context switching and interrupt handling.

So far my impressions of 5.16.0 are very different. No audio skip, seems to respond well, graphics are on par with 5.13. If it remains stable I'll be happy. Unfortunately, the kernel development folks have slated 5.15 to be a long term release which is unfortunate since it's performance is shit.

By contrast 5.16 on a i7-9700k machine with 32gb of RAM clocked at 4.9Ghz, with a MariaDB, a Windows 10 VM running Flyff (a 3DMMORPG), Winamp running under Wine, Firefox, the Mate Desktop and half a Dozen mate-terminals and various widgets, it has a load average of only 2.6, that means 5 cores are sitting idle and one is only partially occupied, and at that 26% CPU in userspace, only 1.9% in kernel space. so HUGE improvement over 5.15.