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.

The latest ARM Linux benchmarks to share at Phoronix is a comparison of Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux when running from the dual-core Cortex-A9 OMAP4460-based PandaBoard ES development board.

With LLVM/Clang 3.2 being released next month and the code branching occurring this month, here's some new benchmarks from the latest SVN development snapshot as of this weekend. LLVM/Clang 3.2 SVN benchmarks were compared to the earlier LLVM 3.1 and 3.0 releases for reference.

This month from CPUs based upon AMD's new Piledriver micro-architecture I have delivered results of compiler tuning on AMD's Open64 compiler as well as GCC bdver2 tuning. That initial testing from an AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core processor didn't show any big boost out of the "bdver2" target with the new BMI/TBM/F16C/FMA3 instruction set extensions. Testing in this article from the AMD FX-8350 are GCC compiler benchmarks of the 4.6.3, 4.7.2, and 4.8.0 development snapshots to look for performance improvements on this new high-end AMD processor when using the very latest GCC compiler code.

With this week's unveiling of the FX-8350 eight-core processor being based on AMD's new Piledriver architecture, in this article are benchmarks when testing out the Piledriver "bdver2" optimizations within AMD's own Open64 compiler.

As some more benchmarks from the Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-100 ARM Server -- a.k.a. the "5-Watt Linux Server" -- to share this weekend, here is a ARMv7 Cortex-A9 GCC compiler performance comparison.

Earlier this week I posted new Reiser4 file-system benchmarks that compared the non-mainline file-system against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Continuing in the Linux file-system performance theme, in this article are more Btrfs benchmarks from that same system but when using the early Linux 3.7 development kernel and trying out different Btrfs mount/tuning options.

With the initial Linux results for the AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU now out of the way along with the Radeon HD 7660D graphics performance, in this article are some benchmarks looking at the impact of compiler tuning for the Piledriver cores using the common GCC compiler and testing different CPU micro-architecture targets.

While the Reiser4 file-system has been in-development for the better part of the past decade, it still hasn't been merged into the mainline Linux kernel. Reiser4 is still out-of-tree, doesn't see much new development activity by its limited developers, and the file-system remains tarnished due to its founder, Hans Reiser, being a convicted murderer. However, Edward Shishkin the former Namesys employee, does continue to drive its development forward. Reiser4 was recently updated to work with the more modern Linux 3.5 kernel.

For those that have never benchmarked the performance differences between GCC's different optimization levels, here are some recent test results comparing the performance differences when using an AMD FX-8150 processor with GCC 4.7.2.

With LLVM 3.2 set for release in mid-December, the time to benchmark this next major compiler infrastructure release paired with the Clang C/C++ compiler is approaching. Well, that time has already come; up this weekend are some benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition" on Ubuntu 12.04 when comparing LLVM/Clang 3.1 to their latest SVN development code for LLVM/Clang 3.2 as of this week.

As the latest AMD Bulldozer Linux benchmarks, here are updated figures on compiler tuning for the FX-8150 processor when using GCC 4.7.1.

It was 25 years ago today, on 15 September 1987, that Version 11 Release 1 of the X Window System (a.k.a. X11) was released. X11 has evolved a long way since then, but this 25-year-old technology out of MIT remains at the heart of every Linux desktop.

On this Friday we have a freelance open-source opinion article that was written by Ciprian Khlud. This developer, who uses C# among other languages at his place of employment along with a combination of Windows and Linux, argues why the Mono open-source ECMA CLI/C#/.NET implementation is actually desirable for Linux.

In continuation of last week's OpenGL benchmarks under Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE desktops from Ubuntu 12.10, here are benchmarks looking at the 2D performance of these different Linux desktop environment choices when testing both the Intel UXA and SNA acceleration back-ends.

For those curious whether the forthcoming Oracle VirtualBox 4.2 virtualization platform delivers on any performance enhancements, at least as it pertains to Linux virtualization, here are some quick benchmarks.

With the recent interest regarding Link-Time Optimization support within the Linux kernel by GCC, here are some benchmarks of the latest stable release of GCC (v4.7.1) when benchmarking several common open-source projects with and without the performance-enhancing LTO compiler support.

Last week I delivered OpenGL/3D benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing the performance of the default Unity desktop to the now-defunct Unity 2D environment. Canonical's decision to kill Unity 2D means that for those now forced to use the Compiz-based Unity may experience lower frame-rates, high power consumption with Unity-over-LLVMpipe, and other differences. Additional testing has shown how Unity is affecting the 2D graphics performance.

Kicking off the Linux benchmarks this weekend are some early numbers from the GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 development compilers when running on Intel's latest-generation Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor. GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 are still months away from being formally released, but this article provides a glimpse at how the open-source compiler battle is panning out.

Following yesterday's news that Ubuntu 12.10 will drop the Unity 2D desktop, I carried out some quick tests comparing the latest state of the Unity desktop with Compiz against the lightweight Unity 2D desktop that's now being removed. To not much surprise, the composited Unity desktop still has some performance shortcomings for OpenGL workloads compared to Unity 2D.

Following the news shared today that Ubuntu's delayed their Wayland System Compositor adoption from Ubuntu 12.10 to at least Ubuntu 13.04 there was the more positive news that there's an updated third-party spin of an Ubuntu derivative running Wayland. This article has some more information on that new "RebeccaBlack OS" release along with screenshots that provide a glimpse of where the Wayland adoption is at today.

Ubuntu 12.10 will not be shipping with a Wayland-based system compositor as was once hoped for, but the experimental system compositor can be enabled from a PPA in a very primitive state.

Aside from VMware virtualization smacking Oracle VirtualBox when it comes to the OpenGL support that's passed through to VM guests, VMware Fusion 4 also does a nice job at outperforming VirtualBox when it comes to computational-focused workloads.

Earlier this year I said VMware's virtual GPU driver was running fast for Linux -- in comparison to Oracle's VM VirtualBox 3D guest acceleration support. This continues to be the case with VMware's OpenGL stack leading the way with superior support and performance. Recently I ran some desktop virtualization tests under VMware Fusion 4.1.3 and Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.18 from the Retina MacBook Pro with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion host. Even with the OS X host, VMware's 3D support exposed to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS virtualized guest was much faster.

Days ago benchmarks were shared from OpenBenchmarking.org that compared AHCI and IDE modes under Linux when it came to the resulting disk performance. There was a fair amount of interest generated out of that so some AHCI vs. IDE mode comparisons from a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD on an Ubuntu Linux host were benchmarked at Phoronix.

With talk of a massive power regression in the recently released Linux 3.5 kernel, yesterday I began benchmarking some different systems with varying versions of the Linux kernel looking for any new kernel power regressions on different hardware.

Here are benchmarks of all major GNU Compiler Collection releases from GCC 4.2.4 through the latest GCC 4.8 development build. Benchmarking was of the seven GCC compiler releases from an Intel Core i7 "Clarksfield" system and an AMD Opteron "Shanghai" workstation.

Phoronix Test Suite 4.0-Suldal expands the capabilities of Phoronix Media's leading open-source, multi-platform testing software to advance the areas of standardized automated benchmarking, per-commit regression testing, and performance efficiency monitoring.

With Ubuntu 12.10 coming up in just a few months, here are our first virtualization benchmarks from the forthcoming "Quantal Quetzal" operating system. Compared in this article is the raw/bare-metal performance to Linux KVM and Xen virtualization from the latest Linux 3.5 kernel.

It has been a while since last benchmarking the ZFS file-system under Linux, but here's some benchmarks of the well-known Solaris file-system on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and compared to EXT4 and Btrfs when using both a hard drive and solid-state drive.

Here are some OpenCL benchmarks from the Intel Ivy Bridge CPU. Being compared though is AMD's APP SDK, which does support running OpenCL on x86 CPUs, to Intel's CPU-based OpenCL SDK for Linux. To some surprise, AMD's Accelerated Parallel Processing SDK when using the Ivy Bridge CPU is actually faster than the Intel OpenCL SDK on the same hardware.