Software Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 904 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for software. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

The GNOME 2011 User Survey is about to end (the survey period was extended as I was out of the office the past two weeks), but here's the latest batch of one-thousand responses about the GNOME desktop. The survey responses in full from the other questions will be published soon.

To see how the GCC 4.7 release is shaping up, for your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of GCC 4.2 through a recent GCC 4.7 development snapshot. GCC 4.7 will be released next March/April with many significant changes, so here's some numbers to find out if you can expect to see any broad performance improvements. Making things more interesting, the benchmarks are being done from an AMD FX-8150 to allow you to see how the performance of this latest-generation AMD processor architecture is affected going back by GNU Compiler Collection releases long before this open-source compiler had any optimizations in place.

Among many other enhancements and alterations, the Linux 3.2 kernel, the Btrfs file-system has some "pretty beefy" changes. Btrfs in Linux 3.2 merges in some long-standing Btrfs branches with new capabilities.

The GNOME 2011 User Survey is still going on, so be sure to participate, but here is part four of the free-style responses.

The Open64 5.0 compiler was released earlier this month with many changes, among the prominently noted items were greater optimizations for AMD's Bulldozer CPUs. In this article is a first-look at the Open64 5.0 compiler performance compared to its earlier release, as tested on an AMD FX-8150 eight-core "Bulldozer" processor.

If you happen to be running a Linux system with Xen support enabled, beware there may be odd behavior with the Linux kernel's power management -- it can easily move in either direction.

The GNOME 2011 User Survey is still going on, so be sure to participate. For those wanting to know what other Linux desktop users are saying about the GNOME3 desktop environment, here's one thousand more comments.

It is time for another round of compiler benchmarks on AMD's latest FX-8150 Bulldozer processor. In this article is comparing the GCC 4.6.1, GCC 4.7 development, Open64 4.2.4, and AMD Open64 4.2.5.2 compilers in their stock configuration, when the binaries are built again but with the march/mtune flags set to "bdver1", and a third when being built with the "bdver1" architecture and tuning flags along with "-Ofast" for the highest-level of compiler optimizations.

At long last, it looks like there is an adequate solution to the Active State Power Management (ASPM) problem in the Linux kernel , a.k.a. the well-known and wide-spread power regression in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which has been causing many laptops to go through significantly more power than they should. This is not another workaround, but rather a behavioral change in the kernel to better decide when the PCI Express ASPM support should be toggled.

For those interested by last week's articles on the AMD Bulldozer benchmarks of the GCC, Open64, and LLVM/Clang compilers and the FX-8150 compiler tuning, but curious to know how the new LLVM/Clang 3.0 and other compilers perform on other processors, here's some new test results. These tests are looking at GCC 4.6, LLVM/Clang 3.0-RC1, and AMD Open64 compilers on Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Shanghai hardware.

The "AMD F15h cache aliasing issue" fixes have landed, which address cache aliasing penalties for AMD Bulldozer (Family 15h) processors. This can lead to performance improvements for some workloads.

After recently comparing the AMD Bulldozer with the GCC, Open64, and LLVM/Clang compilers, in this article is a look at the performance of AMD's Open64 compiler when using their recommended compiler tuning options for Bulldozer when building software.

While last week I showed how Ubuntu's performance has evolved as a KVM guest from Ubuntu 8.04 through Ubuntu 11.10, in today's article is a Linux virtualization showdown between VirtualBox, Xen, and KVM while using Ubuntu 11.10 on the Linux 3.0 kernel.

A few days ago I shared the first one thousand comments about the GNOME desktop from the 2011 GNOME User Survey. Here's now the next set of one thousand comments concerning the state of GNOME in the eyes of end-users.

Last week the 2011 GNOME User Survey began, which is an independent survey that was devised by members of the GNOME community to collect feedback on their desktop platform. With the GNOME Foundation not interested in hosting the survey, these survey creators came to Phoronix to host the survey. Some of the initial GNOME comments were shared shortly after the survey went live. This survey will be running for one month, but there were already more than 8,000 submissions in the first few days. Here's the first 1,000 comments provided by participants of the GNOME survey.

In continuing from yesterday's AMD FX-4100 "Bulldozer" Linux benchmarks, here are more Ubuntu test results from this system comparing the stock GCC 4.5.2 and GCC 4.6.1 compilers for the new Bulldozer platform.

Last week I published benchmark results of using Intel AES-NI for Ubuntu home directory encryption, but the benefits of using this new x86 instruction set found on the latest Intel and AMD (as of today's Bulldozer launch) processors was minimal for this eCryptfs-based solution. Continuing in the AES-NI investigation under Linux, today are benchmark results when using AES-NI for full-disk encryption with dmcrypt.

While I was away for three weeks, there was an update on LP bug #760131, the infamous bug report on the power consumption being raised significantly higher in Ubuntu Natty. This bug report of high importance now indicates a fix being committed to Natty and a fix being released for Oneiric, but what has changed? Here is an update.

Supported by modern Intel processors is the AES instruction set, which is designed to improve the speed of encryption and decryption on the CPU for AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard. Under Ubuntu Linux, even for supported hardware, the Intel AES-NI capability is not taken advantage of when enabling its data encryption feature. The Intel AES-NI support can be easily enabled, but what is the impact on performance? Here are some benchmarks.

Recently I published benchmarks of Btrfs from a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD (the excellent OCZ Vertex 3 SSD) and those results were interesting, but most people aren't running 6Gb/s solid-state drives, so how does this next-generation file-system perform on the opposite end of the spectrum? In this article are EXT4 and Btrfs benchmarks from an old Core Duo notebook with a 5400RPM mobile hard drive.

On Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I hosted a question and answer panel about contributing to X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel. Much of the information presented, however, is relevant to any open-source / free software project. The panel participants were largely graphics driver developers that started off contributing to open-source when at university and some of them have since moved on to working for major Linux companies, i.e. Intel and Red Hat. The talk was very interesting and Chicago computer science students were free to ask questions of them.

With more and more of one's personal and professional lives being on the computer, encrypting and properly securing those computers -- particularly mobile devices -- is incredibly important. Sadly, it's not often thought about until it's too late. It has become relatively easy to protect your personal data on Ubuntu Linux with home directory encryption support being just a checkbox-away within the installer or even full-disk LVM encryption when using Ubuntu's alternate installer. Previous tests of Ubuntu disk encryption performance have shown there is some penalty in disk-centric workloads, but the benefits are certainly worth it. In this article is a look at the Ubuntu home encryption performance under Ubuntu 11.10 with both old and new laptops.

Next Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I am hosting a Q&A panel about contributing to X.Org and open-source projects, where the panel participants are largely comprised of well known X.Org and Mesa developers that began contributing while at university. In hopes of sparking new contributors to these key open-source projects, computer science students from the major Chicago universities have been invited to attend this panel discussion and anyone else wishing to learn more about open-source development. In preparation for this panel, I have been collecting some new development statistics on Mesa and X.Org.

It's approaching the one-year anniversary of when Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu is going to deploy Wayland with Unity, eventually. As those know that pay attention to the continual flow of information from Phoronix regarding the next-generation Wayland Display Server and Linux graphics drivers in general, it's being developed at a brisk pace and with several key open-source projects now betting big on its adoption, but how's it playing in the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 11.10?

If you were hoping that the Linux 3.1 kernel would fix the big power regression problem that's caused by PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) being disabled on more systems since the release of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, you're not in luck. There has not been any active work in this area. Making things worse though for mobile Linux users interested in a long lasting battery is another new regression in the Linux 3.1 kernel. Affected systems can easily see a 30% increase in power consumption simply when comparing the Linux 3.0 kernel to the current code being assembled for Linux 3.1. For an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook, the power consumption is up by 76% just over the course of this year from Linux kernel regressions.

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

With my recent work in tracking down Linux power regressions and looking at other areas of Linux power consumption, there's been a number of emails sent in by Phoronix readers concerning the power consumption of web-browsers. In particular, some users seem to think that Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser causes the system to go through noticeably more power than Mozilla Firefox and other web-browsers. But how much is this really the case? Here's some benchmarks.

In the middle of July, Adobe released the first Flash Player 11 beta, which had updated the Linux version too. The Flash Player 11 release notably incorporated native 64-bit support, once again, after the earlier "Square" 64-bit beta had lagged behind in terms of updates. Shortly following the Flash Player 11 Beta 1 release I had carried out some Linux benchmarks, but those results never seemed to make it out the door. Here are those results for anyone interested in seeing how the CPU usage and system power consumption differ between Flash 11 with and without VDPAU rendering and then against the open-source Gnash Flash Player.

This weekend at the Desktop Summit in Berlin, plans were presented by Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of the KWin compositing window manager, for supporting the Wayland Display Server as an alternative to KDE being limited to X11. For early adopters and those using Plasma Active, KDE on Wayland should become a reality in the 2012 calendar year.

With Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand and the new MATISK support, over one thousand revisions of the Mesa graphics library were benchmarked. Two small performance optimizations were also noted.