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.

While the latest Linux kernel has Intel P-State driver support for CPU frequency scaling being done by this Intel-specific driver rather than the common ACPI CPUFreq driver, for some common tests -- especially Linux gaming -- the latest-generation Intel CPUs perform noticeably better using the CPUFreq driver. Here are some CPUFreq vs. P-State drivers when testing the available scaling governors.

A Phoronix reader recently asked about adding perf profiling to PTS for helping to better identify performance problems within the Linux kernel. As it was easy to do and further shows how easy and extensible the Phoronix Test Suite can be, I added such a module today. Here's some more details on how -- whenever running any benchmark -- via the Phoronix Test Suite you can very trivially expose all of the performance event counts on a universal per-test basis.

With development activity on the Linux 4.3 kernel settling down, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the Linux 4.2 and Linux 4.3 Git kernels atop Ubuntu when using an Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake system.

With GNOME 3.18 having many Wayland improvements, I decided to test out the GNOME 3.18 stack on Fedora 23 Beta when running GNOME on a conventional X.Org Server and then using GNOME on Wayland while running various OpenGL games.

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.3-rc1 yesterday, a day earlier than planned, to ward off any subsystem/driver maintainers from sending in last-day pull requests. With the merge window now closed for Linux 4.3, here's a look at our highlights for the new and improved functionality of this next Linux kernel release.

With PHP 7.0 RC2 having just been released, I've been testing it out thoroughly across a range of Linux systems at Phoronix. To the say the least, the performance claims made by PHP developers about the upcoming PHP7 release are very accurate: it's pretty darn fast and about twice as fast as PHP 5.6. Here are some benchmarks I did on Ubuntu Linux x86_64 comparing the performance of PHP 7.0 RC2 to PHP 5.3/5.4/5.5/5.6, along with some HHVM results tossed in at the end.

Continuing in our compiler benchmarks this week are some GCC vs. Clang C/C++ compiler performance benchmarks on Intel's new Skylake processor while testing from Ubuntu Linux 64-bit.

A few days ago I posted some LLVM Clang 3.7 vs. GCC compiler benchmarks on Linux in time for the release of LLVM 3.7. While LLVM/Clang 3.7 brings full support for OpenMP 3.1, OMP tests were omitted from the original article due to running into some issues. In this article are some reference tests for Clang OpenMP performance with the latest mainline SVN code compared to GCC.

With the official release of LLVM 3.7 being imminent, here are some fresh compiler benchmarks comparing its performance on Linux x86_64 to that of LLVM Clang 3.6 as well as GCC 4.9 and GCC 5.2.

Another year, another new file-system, or so it seems in the Linux world. The main goal for this new file-system is to "match ext4 and xfs on performance and reliability, but with the features of btrfs/zfs."

It's been a while since last running any Intel P-State / CPUfreq scaling governor benchmarks on Phoronix. With a premium subscriber expressing interest in seeing a fresh comparison, here are some new numbers when running an Intel Core i7 Haswell CPU with NVIDIA GeForce graphics on Ubuntu 15.04 with the Linux 3.19 kernel and testing the different scaling drivers and governors.

It's SIGGRAPH week! Our embargo was just lifted by The Khronos Group for talking about their exciting specification updates and more that they'll be sharing with the attendees at this annual, leading graphics conference in Los Angeles. In this article are the details on the new OpenGL ES 3.2 specification, new desktop OpenGL extensions, the Safety Critical Working Group, and some talk about SPIR-V/Vulkan but the new graphics API specification itself isn't being released from SIGGRAPH.

For a large portion of Linux and Mac users the reality is there will be some Windows program that they will still have to use on a daily or near-daily basis. For many the answer is Wine, letting them use their applications with a variable amount of success on their new *nix system. Unfortunately Wine doesn't come with any guarantee of support for a given application, nor is there any level of support from the developers beyond the community, or a generous developer. Enter CrossOver.

Beyond last week's Debian GNU/Hurd vs. GNU/Linux comparison, another set of updated benchmarks sought by some Phoronix Premium members have been a fresh cross-desktop environment comparison when running various games / OpenGL benchmarks across desktops / window managers.

Last month I wrote about the latest Linux kernel yielding better performance for Intel Bay Trail hardware. Those gains also carry over to Intel's newest Braswell SoCs. Here are some tests with the newest Linux kernel and Mesa Git code when using the new Intel Braswell NUC with Celeron N3050.

The Linux 4.2 kernel that's currently under development ships many new features, but as I've been writing about for a while and tweeting, the 4.2 Git code hasn't been booting on many systems in my test lab for over one week. Various Phoronix readers have also been able to reproduce these different kernel panics that happen almost immediately into the boot process. Here's the root problem affecting Linux 4.2 on my daily Linux benchmarking systems...

When I sent the Fedora 22 KDE Review off to Michael I did it with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn't because I didn't like KDE, or hadn't been enjoying Fedora, far from it. In fact, I started to transition my T450s over to Arch Linux but quickly decided against that, as I enjoyed the level of convenience that Fedora brings to me for many things.

If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window will close this afternoon followed by the immediate release of the Linux 4.2-rc1 test version. With all major pull requests having already been submitted for Linux 4.2, here's an overview of the exciting new features and changed functionality to look forward to with this kernel version to officially debut later this summer!

With the Linux 4.1 kernel having recently been released, I decided to conduct a fresh round of file-system comparisons on this new kernel using a solid-state drive. The file-systems tested in this article were the in-tree EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 file-systems while a follow-up article will take a look at the out-of-tree contenders like Reiser4 and ZFS atop Linux 4.1.

One of the most often voiced complaints about Open Source Software is that it tends to be "ugly" or otherwise aesthetically uninspired. A few years ago a few people in the KDE camp came together and created, what they hoped, would be a solution to that problem: The KDE Visual Design Group.

Besides presenting a lot of new kernel features and functionality, the upcoming Linux 4.1 kernel release is potentially very exciting if you're an owner of certain classes of Intel hardware that offer better performance under this new kernel -- and in some cases, better battery life. Here's some tests from yet another system I found exhibiting some promising results from this new 2015 summer kernel version.

Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 was released today as the latest quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software. Beyond offering a significant number of new features, the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 release commemorates seven years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and eleven years since the start of Phoronix.com in what's evolved to become the largest Linux hardware destination on the Internet.

For a few months now I've been talking about the LinuxBenchmarking.com initiative to provide daily benchmark results of the latest development Git/SVN code for various open-source projects in a fully-automated manner... Among the projects being tracked have been the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, etc. There's dozens of systems at Phoronix Media in "the basement server room" doing nothing but running these upstream benchmarks day in and day out. The data flow is now open at LinuxBenchmarking.com.

There's numerous recent features to talk about this weekend for those interested in tracking Linux system performance, monitoring upstream projects for performance regressions, and carrying out other similar work using open-source software on Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris.

Today's post by the new Phoronix intern is looking at the state of various new (and experimental) features within Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Covered in this article is the Electrolysis e10s multi-process model, Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Skia, off-main thread compositing, and sandboxing.

A few days ago I ran some fresh hard drive file-system benchmarks on Linux 4.0 and today those results are being complemented by the solid-state drive results. Tested on the SSD were the popular EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems.

It's been a while since last running any Linux file-system tests on a hard drive considering all of the test systems around here are using solid-state storage and only a few systems commissioned in the Linux benchmarking test farm are using hard drives, but with Linux 4.0 around the corner, here's a six-way file-system comparison on Linux 4.0 with a HDD using EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and even NTFS, NILFS2, and ReiserFS.

Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 was released today as the quarterly update to Phoronix Media's open-source, cross-platform benchmarking and automated testing software.

For those that may soon be upgrading to the recently released Linux 3.19 kernel, here's some file-system tests comparing EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS on a solid-state drive compared to Linux 3.18.

My latest Intel Broadwell Linux benchmarks are looking at the performance of the in-development GCC 5 compared to GCC 4.9, the current stable release shipped by many Linux distributions throughout 2014.