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.

Another day, another round of Intel Broadwell Linux benchmarks. Being looked at this morning are some GCC vs. Clang compiler benchmarks for this latest Intel microarchitecture succeeding Haswell.

The release of LLVM 3.6 is expected next month as a significant step forward to this innovative compiler infrastructure. For those curious how its performance is shaping up, I've carried out some fresh LLVM Clang 3.5 vs. LLVM Clang 3.6-rc1 benchmarks this weekend.

Phoronix Test Suite 5.4-Lipki is released to end out another year of improving open-source and Linux benchmarking. Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 features the next-generation, open-source Phoromatic server and client software.

With the Linux 3.18 development settling down, here's our usual benchmarks of the new kernel when comparing the file-system performance against the previous stable version (Linux 3.17) for EXT4, F2FS, XFS, and Btrfs.

In celebration of Ubuntu 14.10's Utopic Unicorn release today, here's some fresh benchmarks of one of the most requested topics: 2D/3D benchmarks of different desktop environments. In this article is a look at six of the popular desktop offerings found in Ubuntu 14.10.

With this week's Fedora 21 Alpha release delivering the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver code, the newest Wayland code, and the updated GNOME 3.14 desktop with its day-to-day support for Wayland, I've been busy benchmarking.

With the Linux 3.17 kernel due out soon, here's our routine file-system benchmarks we do each kernel cycle to see how the popular Linux file-systems have evolved between kernel releases.

Continuing in our recent CPUFreq vs. P-State scaling driver benchmarks, here's some tests from the eight-core Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system as we test the two CPU frequency scaling drivers and their different governors.

With X.Org Server 1.16 having landed in Ubuntu 14.10, it's time for some benchmarks comparing the 1.15 and 1.16 releases on Ubuntu while using the GLAMOR 2D acceleration library.

Sunday benchmarks this week on Phoronix are comparing nine popular, mainline file-systems present within the Linux 3.17 kernel. All the usual contenders are present and the benchmarks happened with a solid-state disk.

In adding some extra tests besides what was shared in our large Linux review of the new AMD FX CPUs from earlier in the week, that included a fairly big comparison of Intel and AMD CPUs, here's some more Linux test results for just the FX-8370E, FX-8370, and FX-9590 processors.

In anticipation of the LLVM 3.5 release that brings a number of new compiler features -- including possible performance improvements from our benchmarking done earlier today -- here's some benchmarks comparing LLVM Clang 3.5 RC3 to a recent SVN snapshot of the GCC 5.0 compiler that's presently under development.

If all goes well, LLVM 3.5 will be released today. While we have already delivered some LLVM/Clang benchmarks of the 3.5 SVN code, over the days ahead we will be delivering more benchmarks of the updated compiler stack -- including looking at its performance against the in-development GCC 5.0. For getting this latest series of compiler benchmarking at Phoronix started, here's some fresh numbers of LLVM Clang 3.4 compared to a recent release candidate of LLVM Clang 3.5.

As I wrote about yesterday, there appears to be a new Linux kernel power regression that's yet to be solved by the latest Linux 3.17 code. The issue was originally tracked down to being a regression introduced during the Linux 3.15 stable cycle that disabled frame-buffer compression support by default for the Intel DRM graphics driver, but the impact it's had on the system power draw is much greater than what was anticipated by the Intel developers. A separate Intel employee is also reporting increased power draw, so I decided to run some tests on a few local systems to see what I'm encountering in the power consumption primarily between Linux 3.15 and 3.16.

In past months on Phoronix we have done many CPUfreq tests to see the impact of the different scaling governors and with Intel hardware how the CPUfreq driver compares to Intel P-State in terms of performance and power consumption. As we haven't done such ACPI CPUfreq tests on the AMD side in a long time, here's some benchmarks using a Kaveri APU and selecting the different scaling governors during performance benchmarking.

For those wondering about the modern performance cost of using KVM on Ubuntu Linux for virtualizing a guest OS, here are some simple benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 14.10 in its current development stage with the Linux 3.16 versus running the same software stack while virtualized with KVM and using virt-manager.

After a last minute delay earlier this month, Keith Packard of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has officially announced the X.Org Server 1.16 release. XWayland and other changes make xorg-server 1.16 a super exciting release!

When running my initial Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD I had to skip over Btrfs due to initial problems with the experimental kernel code. Fortunately, Btrfs has been fixed-up in Linux 3.16 and can now serve for some benchmarking.

With the Linux 3.16 kernel coming along nicely, here's our first tests of this forthcoming major kernel upgrade when it comes to the mainline file-systems and their performance from a solid-state drive.

For those curious about the performance of LLVM Clang in its current development form when testing the common code generation options for optimizing the performance (and in some cases size) of the resulting binaries, here's some fresh compiler benchmarks.

Phoronix benchmarks have shown that when using the Linux 3.16 kernel, the Nouveau performance is faster when taking advantage of the experimental re-clocking. Additionally, the Radeon graphics performance is faster on Linux 3.16 for newer graphics cards thanks to other optimizations. For Intel Haswell Linux users are there any performance improvements in store for Linux 3.16? Here's some tests.

There's been numerous requests lately for more disk I/O scheduler benchmarks on Phoronix of the Linux kernel and its various scheduler options. Given that there's routinely just speculation and miscommunication by individuals over the best scheduler for HDDs/SSDs, here's some fresh benchmarks for reference using the Linux 3.16 kernel.

Up for your viewing pleasure today were some quick benchmarks done of the next-generation KDE desktop stack compared to the KDE 4.13.0 and Unity 7.2.1 desktops of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Phoronix Test Suite 5.2-Khanino is now available as the latest quarterly update to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Windows, Solaris, and OS X platforms with its hundreds of test profiles via OpenBenchmarking.org.

While yesterday's Linux testing at Phoronix revealed Intel Bay Trail graphics are slower than Windows when running in comparison the updated open-source Intel Linux graphics stack, at least the Bay Trail performance for Intel's N2820 NUC has improved in the past few months under Linux.

With the upstream Linux kernel nearly compatible with LLVM's Clang compiler as an alternative to using GCC, I benchmarked the latest "LLVMLinux" code that's the Linux kernel compiled under Clang with some out-of-tree patches to see how its performance compares to a conventionally built kernel with GCC 4.8.

With it looking like LLVM Clang 3.5 might finally have OpenMP support, I tested out Intel's latest out-of-tree LLVM/Clang OpenMP code to see how the performance compares to GCC for this multi-processing API. Overall, the Clang results increase the level of competition against GCC.

With the release of Intel's PowerTOP 2.6 a few days ago I have done some benchmarking using an ASUS Zenbook Prime ultrabook to see the impact of the power consumption while running on battery for a clean, stock install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit and then did the same tests again after having PowerTOP 2.6 optimize the system so it's in a good power standing. Beyond testing the stock Linux 3.13 kernel, then I carried out the same tests again when using the Linux 3.15 kernel in its very latest development state.

There's been many requests to run some new OpenGL and 2D performance benchmarks under different Linux desktop environments. With the imminent release of Linux Mint 17 and it shipping the latest version of the increasingly-popular Cinnamon Desktop Environment, here's a six-way desktop performance comparison using Intel graphics on Linux Mint 17.

For this weekend's Linux benchmarks we are looking at the performance of the Intel P-State and ACPI cpufreq drivers and comparing their scaling governor options when testing from an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition system running with the Linux 3.15 development kernel.