Software Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 905 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for software. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

With the mention earlier this week of GCC potentially enabling the vectorize options at the -O2 optimization level, I carried out some fresh GCC 9 development benchmarks at various optimization levels for reference.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.0-rc1, what was formerly known as Linux 4.21 over the past two weeks. While the bumping was rather arbitrary as opposed to a major change necessitating the big version bump, this next version of the Linux kernel does come with some exciting changes and new features (of course, our Twitter followers already have known Linux was thinking of the 5.0 re-brand from 4.21). Here is our original feature overview of the new material to find in this kernel.

With the release earlier this month of Oracle VirtualBox 6.0, besides running some benchmarks of its VMSVGA 3D graphics support, I also ran some basic benchmarks to see how a similarly configured VM under both VirtualBox 6.0 with Linux KVM setup via virt-manager would compare for performance as we hit the end of 2018. This quick round of Linux virtualization tests was done on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX system.

In early 2019 we will see the first stable release of GCC 9 as the annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection that is bringing the D language front-end, more C2X and C++ additions, various microarchitecture optimizations from better Znver1 support to Icelake, and a range of other additions we'll provide a convenient recap of shortly. But for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance is looking, here are some fresh benchmarks when benchmarking the latest daily GCC 9.0 compiler against GCC 7.4 and GCC 8.2 atop Clear Linux using an Intel Core i9 7980XE Skylake-X system.

Given the recently release of the PGI 18.10 Community Edition compiler by NVIDIA, I was curious to see how the performance on the CPU is looking for this proprietary compiler on Linux. For those curious as well, here are some benchmarks of the PGI 18.10 C/C++ compiler against the GCC 8.2.0 and LLVM Clang 7.0 open-source compilers.

With yesterday's release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.0, one of the most pressing changes for Linux guests is the use of the new VMSVGA 3D graphics device emulation by default. VMSVGA is the SVGA II graphics adapter from virtualization competitor VMware, but allows for the mature SVGA Linux graphics driver stack to be used. Here are some benchmarks looking at the OpenGL performance on VirtualBox 6.0.

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Linux kernel performance from the start to end of 2018 using an Intel Core i9 7980XE system. Here is the second part of that testing in looking at the same Linux 4.14 vs. 4.20 kernel benchmarking while putting the i9-7980XE performance side-by-side against the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX for seeing how its performance was impacted under the same kernel tests.

Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since Linux 4.10, which was released back in February of 2017, up through the current Linux 4.20 development cycle ahead of its debut at the end of December or early January. All of the Linux kernel benchmarks were done on the same venerable Intel Core i7 5960X system.

Due to the performance fallout from the introduction of STIBP for cross-hyperthread Spectre Variant Two mitigation in the Linux 4.20 kernel, the stable Linux kernels are reverting those patches after originally being quickly back-ported to those branches. For Linux 4.20, STIBP on by default for all processes remain in place until the revised STIBP code is ready for merging that is still expected to happen before the stable Linux 4.20 debut in about one month's time. Here are some initial benchmarks of those preliminary improvements.

Earlier this month marked the release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler 1.3 (AOCC 1.3) with a re-base to the LLVM 7.0 code-base, enhanced loop optimizations, better vectorization, code generation, integration of the optimized AMD Math Library, and other enhancements. Here are some fresh benchmarks against AMD AOCC 1.3 against LLVM Clang 7.0 upstream as well as GCC 8.2.0.

As outlined yesterday, significant slowdowns with the Linux 4.20 kernel turned out to be due to the addition of the kernel-side bits for STIBP (Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors) for cross-HyperThread Spectre Variant Two mitigation. This has incurred significant performance penalties with the STIBP support in its current state with Linux 4.20 Git and is enabled by default at least for Intel systems with up-to-date microcode. Here are some follow-up benchmarks looking at the performance hit with the Linux 4.20 development kernel as well as the overall Spectre and Meltdown mitigation impact on this latest version of the Linux kernel.

After running a lot of tests and then bisecting the Linux 4.20 kernel merge window, the reason for the significant slowdowns in the Linux 4.20 kernel for many real-world workloads is now known...

With GCC 9 embarking upon its third stage of development where the focus ships to working on bug/regression fixes in preparation for releasing the GCC 9.1 stable compiler likely around the end of Q1'2019, here is a fresh look at the GCC 9 performance with its latest development code as of this week compared to GCC 8.2.0 stable while using an Intel Core i9 7980XE test system running Ubuntu Linux. For good measure are also fresh results from LLVM Clang 7.0 stable as well as LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN for the latest development state of that competing C/C++ open-source compiler.

Over the past year we have looked extensively at the performance impact of Spectre mitigations on x86_64 CPUs but now with having the Raptor Talos II in our labs, here are some benchmarks to see the performance impact of IBM's varying levels of Spectre mitigation for POWER9.

Of the announcements from yesterday's AMD Next Horizon event, one that came as a surprise was the rolling out of current-generation EPYC processors to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Available so far are the AMD-powered M5a and R5a instance types to offer Amazon cloud customers more choice as well as being priced 10% lower than comparable instances. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD performance in the Amazon cloud.

With Linus Torvalds having just released Linux 4.20-rc1, here is our original feature overview looking at the major changes merged over the past two weeks for this new kernel. The Linux kernel will be ending 2018 on a high note with this kernel bringing more than 350 thousand lines of new code!

One of the benefits with the recently launched Core i9 9900K is hardware-based mitigations for Meltdown and L1TF/Foreshadow vulnerabilities. but mitigations are still needed for the other Spectre vulnerabilities. In this article is a look at the performance impact of still needing generic Retpolines via IBPB IBRS firmware for Spectre V2 and Speculative Store Bypass disabling (SSBD) for Spectre V4.

Now that WebRender has reached beta within Firefox Nightly, I decided to run some fresh web-browser benchmarks to see how this GPU-accelerated web rendering is working out for Firefox and how it compares to that of Google Chrome in some popular browser benchmarks.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0-Rakkestad is officially shipping today as the latest quarterly feature release to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software. In addition to the Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 itself, there is the first official release of the newly-introduced "phoronix/pts" Docker image on Docker Hub for easily carrying out the benchmarks with the pre-seeded image.

Given last week's big GNOME 3.30 release I was eager to test the updated desktop environment with its Mutter compositor improvements on Wayland as well as seeing how its performance under the conventional X.Org Server. Here are some of these benchmarks of various graphics applications and games tested under both GNOME 3.28.3 and GNOME 3.30.0 with both Wayland and X.Org sessions.

There is a new public cloud provider that exited beta this past weekend and is exclusively offering Linux instances from Arch Linux to CentOS to Debian and Fedora. In addition to the usual assortment of Intel Xeon powered clouds/VPS instances, they also offer a range of AMD EPYC powered systems too.

With many of our other initially planned Threadripper 2 Linux benchmarks out of the way, recently I carried out a compiler benchmarking comparison on the Zen+ Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX between GCC and Clang.

One of the most frequent test requests recently has been to look at the overall performance cost of Meltdown/Spectre mitigations on the latest Linux kernel and now with L1TF/Foreshadow work tossed into the mix. With the Linux 4.19 kernel that just kicked off development this month has been continued churn in the Spectre/Meltdown space, just not for x86_64 but also for POWER/s390/ARM where applicable. For getting an overall look at the performance impact of these mitigation techniques I tested three Intel Xeon systems and two AMD EPYC systems as well as a virtual machine on each side for seeing how the default Linux 4.19 kernel performance -- with relevant mitigations applied -- to that of an unmitigated kernel.

With all of the confusion last week over Intel's short-lived CPU microcode license change that forbid benchmarking only for them to change it a short time later -- to a much nicer license in that the microcode files can be easily redistributed and don't curtail it in other manners (and also re-licensing their FSP too), here are some performance benchmarks when trying out this latest Intel microcode on Linux.

The Linux 4.19-rc1 kernel is expected to be released today and with that marks the end of feature development on this next kernel version. Here is a look at the new and improved features to be found in Linux 4.19.

Making the Phoronix Test Suite even easier to use for container benchmarking, on Docker Hub now is the phoronix/pts image for easily carrying out Docker tests with a fully-standardized, performance-optimized user-space stack with many of the popular test profiles pre-seeded on the disk and is ready to begin benchmarking out-of-the-box.

One of many test requests we have received concerning the AMD Threadripper 2 Linux performance was to look at the impact of the different CPU frequency scaling governors, particularly for the 32-core / 64-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX. Here are those CPUFreq governor benchmarks for those interested in squeezing slightly better performance out of your HEDT system by changing how aggressively or not the system is shifting power states to higher frequencies.

Last week L1 Terminal Fault (a.k.a. L1TF and Foreshadow) was made public as the latest set of speculative execution vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors. This Meltdown-like issue was met by same-day Linux kernel patches for mitigating the problem and does introduce another performance penalty but in this case is at least only limited to virtual machines. Last week I posted some initial L1TF-mitigated KVM-based VM benchmark results using a Core i7 CPU but the results for sharing today are using a much more powerful dual Xeon server.

While yesterday were the benchmarks showing how Linux games struggle to scale past a few CPU cores/threads, in this article is a look at the scaling performance of various applications/workloads under Linux up to 64 threads using the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. Here's a look at how the Linux performance changes in a variety of applications from one to sixty-four threads with this new HEDT processor.

Yesterday the latest speculative execution vulnerability was disclosed that was akin to Meltdown and is dubbed the L1 Terminal Fault, or "L1TF" for short. Here are some very early benchmarks of the performance impact of the L1TF mitigation on the Linux virtual machine performance when testing the various levels of mitigation as well as the unpatched system performance prior to this vulnerability coming to light.