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.

At the beginning of January I posted some early LLVM Clang 6.0 benchmarks on AMD EPYC while in this article is comparing the tentative Clang 6.0 performance to that of the in-development GCC 8.0. Both compilers are now into their feature freeze and this testing looked at the performance of generated binaries both for generic x86_64 as well as being tuned for AMD's Zen "znver1" microarchitecture.

Over the past week and a half of running many benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the Linux KPTI and Retpoline patches for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, one of the most common test requests is some thorough benchmarks on older systems. Why that's important is with older (pre-Westmere) CPUs there isn't PCID (Process Context Identifier) support that's used by KPTI, which helps offset some of the performance loss. So for some test results to share today are two old ThinkPads from the Clarksfield and Penryn days compared to a newer Broadwell ThinkPad in looking at the performance difference.

While the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches were quick to land in the mainline Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, the "Retpoline" patches are still being worked on as the leading approach on the Linux side for dealing with the Spectre CPU vulnerability. The Retpoline patches are said to have little impact on performance, but here are our benchmarks of these kernel patches for seeing how they affect a variety of AMD and Intel systems.

Yet another one of the avenues we have been exploring with our Linux Page Table Isolation (KPTI) testing has been looking at any impact of this security feature in the wake of the Meltdown vulnerability when testing with an older Linux Long Term Support (LTS) release. In particular, when using a kernel prior to the PCID (Process Context Identifier) support in the Linux kernel that is used to lessen the impact of KPTI.

Continuing on with our Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) performance testing are some benchmark results when running tests within a virtual machine on Xeon class hardware.

Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.

With LLVM 6.0 being branched this week and that marking the end of feature development on this next compiler update before its stable debut in February, here are some benchmarks of the very latest LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler on AMD's EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread processor as we see how well the AMD Zen "znver1" tuning is working out.

I've been working on some AMD EPYC virtualization tests on and off the past few weeks. For your viewing before ending out the year are some initial VirtualBox vs. Linux KVM benchmarks for seeing how the guest VM performance compares.

For those wondering how the LLVM Clang vs. GCC C/C++ compiler performance is comparing as we end out 2017, here are some recent benchmarks using the latest Clang 6.0 SVN and GCC 8.0.0 compilers in a range of benchmarks.

This week marked the release of the long-awaited POCL 1.0 release candidate. For the uninformed POCL, or the Portable Computing Language, is a portable implementation of OpenCL 1.2~2.0 that can run on CPUs with its LLVM code generation and has also seen back-ends for its OpenCL implementation atop AMD HSA and even NVIDIA CUDA. I've been trying out POCL 1.0-RC1 on various Intel and AMD CPUs.

The merge window is effectively over for Linux 4.15 with it being the 14th day of the process, although 4.15-rc1 might not end up coming out today due to Linus Torvalds' traveling around the US Thanksgiving holiday. But with Torvalds tending to not approve major last minute additions to new kernels, we don't anticipate any last minute surprises and therefore here is our feature overview of the changes and new features of Linux 4.15. This is arguably the most exciting and feature-packed kernel update ever.

Given the release of a new Blender "Barbershop" benchmark file, I decided to test this new scene plus the other benchmark files with Blender 2.79 on a variety of Intel/AMD CPUs for some fresh results of how various newer CPUs compare for this open-source 3D modeling software.

Our latest Linux file-system benchmarking is looking at the performance of the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems on the Linux 4.14 kernel compared to 4.13 and 4.12.

Given the continuously evolving state of open-source code compilers, especially for the newer AMD Zen "znver1" architecture, here is the latest installment of our compiler benchmarks. Tested for this article from and AMD EPYC 7601 processor were GCC 7.2, GCC 8.0.0, LLVM Clang 5.0, and LLVM Clang 6.0 SVN.

With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.

For squeezing maximum performance out of Linux systems with source-based workloads, most of you know there can often be tweaks to be had to the compiler stack for greater performance. As well with the never-ending advancements to the leading open-source code compilers, between releases can be measurable performance benefits but sometimes not without regressions too. With AMD's EPYC line-up still being very fresh and the underlying Zen microarchitecture (or "znver1" as referred to by the compiler toolchains), here are a variety of benchmarks under recent releases of the GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.

Last week we began with our EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarking of this high-end AMD server CPU featuring 32 cores / 64 threads per socket. Earlier this week were also some 10-year old Opteron vs. EPYC benchmarks and power efficiency tests while the latest in our EPYC Linux testing is seeing how the new AMD processor compares to various Amazon EC2 cloud instances.

With IBM's newly open-sourced J9 Java Virtual Machine as the Eclipse OpenJ9, I've run some quick benchmarks to get an idea how its performance is comparing to the de facto Java Virtual Machine, Hotspot.

With Linux 4.14-rc1 having been released one day early, here is our look at the new features of Linux 4.14 with the merge window having been closed. There's a lot to get excited about with Linux 4.14 from graphics driver improvements, new hardware improvements, a new Realtek WiFi driver, a PWM vibrator driver, and Btrfs Zstd compression support..

While testing out the near-final GNOME 3.26 this weekend I also ran some benchmarks of it comparing the boot time, memory use, power consumption, and gaming performance when comparing GNOME Shell / Mutter running on Wayland and then an X.Org session.

With GNOME 3.26 due to be officially released on Wednesday, 13 September, here is a look at the new features to be found in this major desktop update and screenshots from testing the latest GNOME 3.26 packages via Fedora 27's development images.

One of the first follow-on requests from this morning's Razer Blade Stealth Linux testing was for on top of all the other data-sets shared in that article to also look at the RAM usage, battery power draw, and boot times for the different desktop options on Ubuntu 17.04. As the request came in from a Phoronix Premium supporter, I jumped on that and here are some of those numbers.

As we have been anticipating for weeks/months, a new formal update to OpenGL has been in the works and it's officially out today. Meet OpenGL 4.6! This is a pretty significant update and internally they had the debate whether to call it OpenGL 5.0, but here we are with OpenGL 4.6 that features Vulkan/SPIR-V extensions and more. The good news is the open-source Mesa drivers aren't too far out from OpenGL 4.6 support, at least RadeonSI and Intel.

A few days back I posted some fresh AMD Ryzen compiler benchmarks of LLVM Clang now that it has its new Znver1 scheduler model, which helps out the performance of Ryzen on Linux with some of the generated binaries tested. But it was found still that Haswell-tuned binaries are sometimes still faster on Ryzen than the Zen "znver1" tuning itself. For continuing our fresh compiler benchmarks from AMD's new Ryzen platform, here are the latest GCC numbers.

Just prior to LLVM 5.0 being branched yesterday, the AMD Zen scheduler model finally landed in LLVM and has the potential of boosting the performance of generated binaries targeting AMD's Zen "znver1" architecture. Here are some benchmarks of LLVM Clang 4.0 compared to the latest LLVM Clang compiler code when testing with both generic x86-64 optimizations and then optimized builds for the first-generation Zen CPUs, tested on a Ryzen 7 processor.

With Linux 4.13-rc1 having been released, here's my original look at the new features coming for the Linux 4.13 kernel and the other changes merged over the past two weeks of this new cycle.

A few days back I posted some fresh P-State and CPUFreq governor tests on Intel hardware while now is a similar comparison on the AMD side with a Ryzen 7 1800X processor and Radeon R9 Fury graphics card.

On Friday I posted some benchmarks of AMD's new AOCC code compiler for Ryzen compared to LLVM Clang 4.0/5.0 and GCC 6/7/8. The AOCC 1.0 benchmarks on Ryzen 7 didn't offer much over LLVM Clang for which this "AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler" is based, but in this article are some tuning benchmarks.

This week AMD released AOCC 1.0, the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler, with initial support for Ryzen/Zen CPUs. In this article are our first benchmarks of the AOCC compiler compared to the GCC 6/7/8 and LLVM Clang 4/5 compilers.

With the Linux 4.12 merge window now over, here is a look at some of the most exciting features that were added to the Linux kernel for this next installment.