Phoronix News Archives

Besides a 40-way graphics card comparison between the open and closed-source Linux drivers for both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD graphics processors, there's also a number of other interesting articles coming up on Phoronix. Here's some of what you can expect to see next month on Phoronix.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand Milestone 3 has been released this morning with some exciting enhancements to this open-source, automated testing platform.

It was exactly six months ago that Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org were released during the Southern California Linux Expo. Here's some numbers from where OpenBenchmarking.org is at today.

The second milestone/development release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand is now available to those wishing to benchmark their Linux, BSD, Solaris, Hurd, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 Milestone 2 features several improvements over last month's first development release of this next major version that's codenamed Lillesand.

As I shared last week on Twitter, plans for PHXCMS-8 were conceived last week, which will power a major re-design of Phoronix.com. This process will take several months before the new content management system and design will be rolled-out, but in the meantime are a few tweaks to the Phoronix home-page.

On Friday was a small Phoronix Oslo meet-up that took place in Akker Brygge, Oslo, Norway.

As a reminder to the announcement earlier this week, this Friday evening (29 July) there will be a small Phoronix meet-up/gathering in Aker Brygge, Oslo, Norway.

As mentioned last week, following the deadly terrorist attacks in Norway, I will be in Oslo this week through next Friday when it's time for the Linux Desktop Summit in Berlin. The first Phoronix meet-up is now scheduled to take place this Friday evening, the 29th of July.

Due to yesterday's very unfortunate attacks in the great land of Norway, on the way to the Berlin Desktop Summit I will now be stopping in Oslo for one week to support in any way possible due to knowing individuals affected by the devastating events. A Phoronix Oslo meet-up is also looking to be organized.

The first development release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 (codenamed "Lillesand") is now available. The 3.4 major update to the GPLv3-licensed Phoronix Test Suite software will be available in September, but already this first milestone carries a number of prominent changes.

One of the items I've been working on recently for Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand is new ways to visualize performance result data generated by the many test profiles and suites available via OpenBenchmarking.org. Here's one of the new ways that was committed over the weekend to the Lillesand Git code-base.

As announced this morning on Twitter, the next major release of the Phoronix Test Suite is version 3.4 and it's codenamed Lillesand. Here's some initial details on this next version of our open-source benchmarking platform for Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows that is to be released in September.

The first (and only planned) point release to Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad is now available. This release just incorporates a couple of small changes compared to the official 3.2 release two weeks ago.

For those looking to discuss the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org with Linux benchmarking, Linux kernel power regressions, graphics drivers, or any other Phoronix topics, I'll be in the Seattle and Bellevue areas next week.

It was just over 100 days ago that OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland launched from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Los Angeles. Now that these major releases have been available to the public for over three months, and Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad will be released in just a couple of days, here's some overview statistics of where our open and collaborative testing platform is at today.

Those that follow my Twitter feed know a big software announcement is pending after being set back multiple times over the past week. Here's one graph illustrating the real-world impact of this yet-to-be-announced open-source move for open operating systems.

Phoronix.com is celebrating its seventh birthday today. The Phoronix Test Suite is also officially three years old today as far as the public post-1.0 development is concerned. It's also your final chance to participate in our Unigine OilRush giveaway.

As many are aware, tomorrow Phoronix will turning be seven years old. A site that many technology enthusiasts and other media publications refer to as being the leading source for Linux hardware information and news/reviews, along with being the home to the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, and other web properties. Sunday will also mark the three year anniversary of the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.

The fourth and final development milestone release for Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad has been released this morning.

With there just being seven days until Phoronix turns seven years old, it's time for an annual review. Aside from the ongoing what would you like to see next, your feedback is welcome regarding other improvements you would like to see made.

Phoronix is turning seven years old in two weeks from now, but there's an early gift to the Phoronix community this Friday, in particular a change that John Bridgman of AMD should enjoy.

The third development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad package has been released.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest was not the only European Linux event taking place last week. From Wednesday through Saturday was LinuxTag back in Berlin at their Messe Fairgrounds.

Announced to the public last year by Facebook was HipHop, an open-source project that transforms PHP code into highly-optimized C++ and then uses the GCC C++ compiler to produce a native system binary. Facebook's original numbers showed that by using this transformer/compiler on their servers the CPU usage went down by about 50% and they were able to supply around 70% more traffic on existing resources since the PHP code is no longer being dynamically interpreted. Here's a look at Facebook's HipHop during some of our first tests.

Only one week has passed sine the release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 Milestone 1, but there's some feature patches queued up now for release as 3.2-Grimstad Milestone 2 while waiting to catch a flight over to Munich.

I'm only mentioning this so readers will hopefully stop emailing me regarding the references that have been discovered within Valve's Mac OS X launcher to their new Portal 2 game regarding Linux support.

The first milestone release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad release has been achieved. This first test release is now available for facilitating your automated benchmarks and testing infrastructure under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD platforms whether it be a server, desktop, or mobile device.

One of the emails landing in the Phoronix inbox over the weekend was in regards to the Skia 2D Graphics Library. It was an email asking if we've ever heard of it and how the performance of Skia compares to that of Qt and Cairo. For those unfamiliar with Skia, here's a small scoop on this open-source 2D drawing library.

The forum discussion surrounding TransGaming's GameTree Linux and Cedega Technology continues, with some Linux gamers regretting that they ever even supported TransGaming. One user also brings up the past from when -- back in 2000~2001 -- TransGaming had pledged to open up their code-base once they reached 20,000 subscribers. They believed in an open-source philosophy at that time, but they never ended up opening up their code once hitting that milestone. Even though Cedega as we know it is now dead, this former fork of the X11-licensed Wine is still closed.

For US and European readers, there may soon be some meet-up events for those interested in Phoronix, the Phoronix Test Suite, and OpenBenchmarking.org.

Last April I toured the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site and areas like the Red Forest and Pripyat within Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation. It was an incredibly fascinating trip and ever since returning I've still wanted to go back to spend more days around Chernobyl. All of the recent nuclear coverage and mentions of Chernobyl in the news due to the unfortunate events taking place in Japan (and US / European news media and politicians now over-reacting about nuclear energy concerns), has only made me want to go back sooner. Judging by traffic in recent days to last year's Chernobyl photographs, there's lots of other people interested too. So it may be time to revisit this interesting travel destination.

To those of you using the Phoronix Test Suite and/or OpenBenchmarking.org, Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.1-Iveland is now available. This is the first -- and only -- expected point release to Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 following its launch late last month from the Southern California Linux Expo.

Almost every time benchmarks are published on Phoronix, there's always at least a handful of people - or more - that will right away say the benchmarks are flawed, meaningless, or just plain wrong. Why? Because the software configuration is tested with its default (stock) settings. These users then go on to say that the defaults are not optimized for performance and that "everyone else knows better" to use a particular set of options, etc. But it's my firm belief that it's up to the upstream maintainer -- whether it be the project itself developing the software in question or the distribution vendor that's packaging and maintaining the given component -- to choose the most sane and reliable settings, and that's what most people use. In addition, with open-source software, there's endless possibilities for how a given piece of software can be tuned and tweaked. Here's some numbers confirming these beliefs of testing software at its defaults.

When purchasing commercial software for Windows and Mac OS X you are almost always presented with the system requirements for the software and what the vendor recommends for an optimal experience. When dealing with open-source / Linux software, this is rarely the case. It's far less common to see free software projects that will list their recommended hardware/software configurations, even though in the case of computational and/or graphical intense free software, the recommended system hardware requirements are just as important.

After talking about the first week of OpenBenchmarking.org, which was a great success, news of this open and collaborative testing platform made its way to the front page of Slashdot. This resulted in a huge increase in benchmarks pouring in over last night and they keep coming in today. Thanks to this greater data set, here's a new feature that will interest many of you: the ability to easily find compatible GPUs / motherboards / CPUs / disks that are ranked upon how they perform with a given driver and operating system.

OpenBenchmarking.org has now been live for just under one week since launching it (and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0) from the Southern California Linux Expo when talking about making more informed Linux hardware choices. Here's some statistics on how it's going.

If you're a Linux enthusiast and/or a computer hardware enthusiast, a new blog has launched this morning that definitely should be of interest to you.

OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" were released over the weekend (press release) from the Southern California Linux Expo during our talk entitled Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. Here's some statistics as of this morning that OpenBenchmarking.org has been public for a few days.

In continuation of this morning's slides about Making Better Linux Hardware Choices, here is the preliminary video of our talk from the Southern California Linux Expo where Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org were launched.

In case you didn't figure it out from two exclusive benchmarks appearing on a Saturday morning -- Intel Gallium3D benchmarks and EXT4/Btrfs on the Linux 2.6.38 kernel -- this is to celebrate the availability of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org

With Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org making their official debut this weekend at the Southern California Linux Expo, the second and final test release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland is now available. Feel free to test away as this should be nearly identical to the final release.

With less than two weeks to go until Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" makes its official debut with OpenBenchmarking.org at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), it's time for a release candidate. Hitting the Internet this Monday is the first release candidate of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 with even more improvements.

Today's been another productive day in the continuous quest of Phoronix and its goals pertaining to furthering Linux hardware support and benchmarking.

In less than three weeks the Southern California Linux Expo will be hosting their annual Linux conference in Los Angeles for a ninth year. There will also be SCALE University, an open-source cloud day, and various activities for the openSUSE, Fedora, and PostgreSQL projects. It's also where OpenBenchmarking.org is making its debut alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" during my conference speech.

If you've been wanting to get involved in supporting Linux and other open-source projects with or without a programming background, or you have creative ideas how to get involved, see this thread.

Only a week has passed since issuing Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Beta 2, but some worthwhile code has landed making it time to release a third beta of the forthcoming open-source Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" benchmarking software to tag a new Hawaii-based build from my coding sprint. In particular, this new release can even play with keyboards, mice, network adapters, and other peripheral devices.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org are launching in late February from the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles during my talk about Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. However, for any Bavarians living near Munich, you may be able to get a sneak preview.

If you liked yesterday's OpenBenchmarking.org preview (it looks like many people did) for dramatically easing the quest in finding Linux compatible hardware and easing other hardware comparisons and research, you may want to try out the just-released Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Beta 2 build.

The Phoronix Forums have been updated with a revised theme and other improvements.

After being in development for months, Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" has now entered beta. In preparation for the combined Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org launch from the Southern California Linux Expo at the end of February, the first Iveland beta of our open-source benchmarking platform has been released this morning.