Happy 6th Birthday, Phoronix!

It was on the 5th of June 2004 that I had founded Phoronix and it was two years ago that version 1.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite (codenamed "Trondheim") was officially released. So happy 6th birthday to Phoronix and this can also be celebrated as the 2nd birthday of our open-source automated benchmarking software.

What a long way Phoronix has come. Out of the thousands of news postings that have been written here over the past six years, some of the most popular posts of all-time include AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs, Dell Wants Better ATI Linux Drivers, The Degrading Quality Of X.Org Releases, and Here's The First Screenshot Of The Linux Steam Client.

Out of the plethora of featured articles covering Linux hardware, software, and benchmarking, some of the most popular over the past six years include Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 Benchmarks, ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser, Real World Benchmarks Of The EXT4 File-System, The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Benchmarks: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?, and Touring Chernobyl In 2010.

In the six years of running Phoronix.com it has reached a NetCraft site rank of being the 3,544 (currently) most popular web-site, an Alexa rank of less than 20,000 (and under 10,000 in Germany and many other EU countries), and hundreds of thousands of results now turn up for Phoronix within Google and other search engines.

Over the next year you can expect many more featured articles, tons of benchmarks, and plenty of breaking news. You will also find that truly revolutionary steps will be taken with the Phoronix Test Suite and our related benchmarking components (i.e. Phoromatic and Phoronix Global) to make it even more of a very rich and innovative platform for conducting automated tests and other system profiling. As part of this, you will find that over the coming quarters we will better engage with the different open-source development communities (i.e. the Linux kernel) in assisting them in their testing efforts and making the Phoronix Test Suite collection of software an invaluable asset. Yes, most of the recent criticism whether its justified or not should be quelled. You will also find more public Phoromatic Trackers emerge from our test farm while also extending existing performance trackers (the Linux Kernel Tracker and Ubuntu Tracker).

There will hopefully be plenty of other good news too worth reporting over the next year. Of course, if you want to help us out and see this work fulfilled, you can help us out by disabling AdBlock or subscribing to Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing and reading entire articles on a single page, use our shopping links when making online purchases at NewEgg and Amazon, or you can also give us a tip/donation. We can also be followed on Facebook, Twitter, or Identi.ca.

Coming up next week I will be at LinuxTag in Berlin covering the Linux and open-source happenings from that German event, but in my absence there will be the usual flow of new articles including an up-to-date look at the Gallium3D vs. classic Mesa driver performance on ATI R500 hardware, Btrfs benchmarks using the Linux 2.6.35 kernel and different mount options, a review of the ZaReason Verix notebook, and also a review on the OCZ Solid 2 SSD.

Happy Birthday Phoronix! Prost!