While Microsoft is working on low-level improvement to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to yield better I/O performance, it is possible to dramatically increase some disk workloads by removing a number of running Windows services via the independent W10Privacy application. Here are some benchmarks of W10Privacy on the overall performance impact to Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 itself and of Ubuntu 18.04 running on the Windows 10 installation via WSL.

With the early release of Linux 4.18-rc1, feature development on Linux 4.18 is over and it's onto roughly eight weeks worth of testing and bug fixes. For those that are behind in their Phoronix reading with our extensive and original reporting on the Linux 4.18 merge window happenings, here is our recap of the big changes that made it into Linux 4.18. We are also in the process of firing off the start of our Linux 4.18 kernel benchmarks.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 has premiered today as the latest quarterly update to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software. This also happens to be our largest release ever and also commemorates ten years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 and fourteen-years since the start of Phoronix. Here is a look at some of the many enhancements to find in this open-source benchmarking software.

Given recent improvements to AMD Zen (znver1) with LLVM, the new AMD AOCC 1.2 compiler release, and GCC 8.1 having premiered just weeks ago, here is a fresh look at the performance of six different C/C++ code compilers when testing the performance of the resulting binaries on an AMD Threadripper 1950X system.

Last month AMD released the AOCC 1.2 compiler for Zen systems. This updated version of their branched LLVM/Clang compiler with extra patches/optimizations for Zen CPUs was re-based to the LLVM/Clang 6.0 code-base while also adding in experimental FLANG support for Fortran compilation and various other unlisted changes to their "znver1" patch-set. Here's a look at how the performance compares with AOCC 1.2 to LLVM Clang 6.0 and GCC 7/8 C/C++ compilers.

In continuing with our recent benchmarks of the brand new GCC 8.1 compiler, here are more tests while using an Intel Skylake CPU and testing with -O2, -O3, and -O3 -march=native optimization levels while comparing the resulting binary performance of GCC 8.1 and GCC 7.3.

With GCC 8.1 having been officially released last week, I have spent the past number of days running a variety of compiler benchmarks comparing this initial GCC8 stable release to the previous GCC 7.3 stable compiler release. Tests were done on five different Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux systems running very different AMD and Intel processors.

Of the many improvements to be found in the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel -- nicely summarized in our Linux 4.17 feature overview -- one of the features I've been anxious the most to begin benchmarking has been the reported power management improvements. Here are my initial power/performance tests of Linux 4.17 that for some systems is seeing a measurable drop in power usage, even in some cases under load while without sacrificing the performance.

Linus Torvalds is expected by the end of the day to release Linux 4.17-rc1, thereby marking the end of the two-week merge window that saw a lot of changes and new features land for Linux 4.17. Here is our original feature overview of the changes to be found in this next major release of the Linux kernel, which should premiere as stable by the middle of June.

This past weekend I posted some Linux 3.17 to Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks using two older Intel hardware platforms and one of the most frequent requests to come in following that article were some AMD benchmarks looking at the Intel Linux performance going a ways back. Here are some test results from Linux 4.4 to 4.16 using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X system.

Our latest benchmarking of the near-final Linux 4.16 kernel is checking on the performance of two Intel systems going back to the days of Linux 3.17, the oldest kernel that would successfully boot with the Ubuntu 18.04 user-space. Every major kernel release was tested as we see how the Linux kernel performance has evolved on these Haswell and Gulftown systems since October 2014.

Since last week's big release of LLVM 6.0 along with Clang 6.0, I have been carrying out some fresh compiler benchmarks of the previous Clang 5.0 to this new stable release that switches to C++14 by default, among many other changes to LLVM itself and this C/C++ compiler front-end.

A few days back I provided some fresh Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks compared to recent stable kernel releases while also toggling the KPTI and Retpoline security features on Linux 4.16 Git for seeing the impact of the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques on this latest kernel while using Intel Xeon hardware. For this latest round of tests is a similar comparison while using an AMD EPYC system.

Moving forward the Phoronix Test Suite will be offering Microsoft Windows support that's at near feature parity to the automated, reproducible, open-source benchmarking support we have offered the past decade for Linux as well as BSD, macOS, and Solaris platforms. This is brand new, rewritten Windows support with a focus on Windows 10 x64 and Windows Server 2016.

For those wondering how the Linux 4.16 kernel is performing with regards to the ongoing work around Spectre and Meltdown mitigation in the kernel, here are some fresh benchmark results.

Given the recent performance changes following the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation and having just wrapped up some fresh CPU bare metal benchmarks as part of that testing as well as the recent AMD Raven Ridge launch, I've carried out a fresh round this week of benchmarks on various Amazon EC2 on-demand instance types compared to a number of bare metal Intel and AMD processors in looking at how the compute performance compares.

Here are some preliminary benchmarks of the Linux 4.16 development kernel compared to Linux 4.15 stable on five different systems.

After the lengthy Linux 4.15 kernel cycle, the past two weeks have marked the Linux 4.16 merge window. Yet again it's been another heavy feature period for the kernel. There is still a lot of mitigation work going on for most CPU architectures surrounding Spectre and also Meltdown, the open-source graphics drivers have continued getting better, various CPU improvements are present, the VirtualBox Guest driver was mainlined, and dozens of other notable changes for Linux 4.16. Take a look.

A few days ago we found out that at the end of 2017 AMD quietly released their AOCC 1.1 C/C++ compiler. AOCC is AMD's compiler succeeding AMD Open64 that existed years ago as their optimized Fortran/C/C++ compiler for past CPU microarchitectures while the "AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler" is designed for current-generation Zen processors. Here are benchmarks of the new AMD AOCC 1.1 release compared to GCC 7, GCC 8, Clang 5.0, Clang 6.0, and Clang 7.0 SVN.

Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since the release of Linux 3.17 in October 2014. With all the major kernel releases over the past 3+ years, here is how the performance compares using two very different Intel Gulftown and Haswell systems.

Our latest in benchmarking the Linux 4.15 kernel is seeing how the performance has changed since Linux 4.0 and all subsequent releases on the same system. Here are those tests driven by curiosity, especially in light of the performance changes as a result of KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline additions.

For those wondering how the Intel (U)HD Graphics compare for games and other graphical benchmarks between desktop environments in 2018, here are some fresh benchmarks using GNOME Shell on X.Org/Wayland, KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, Unity 7, and LXDE.

We have looked several times already at the performance impact of Retpoline support in the Linux kernel, but what about building user-space packages with -mindirect-branch=thunk? Here is the performance cost to building some performance tests in user-space with -mindirect-branch=thunk and -mindirect-branch=thunk-inline.

A new Phoronix Premium member was hypothesizing in the forums whether Ubuntu's low-latency kernel would be performing better in the wake of the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) support in the kernel for fending off the Meltdown CPU vulnerability. With always aiming to deliver on test requests by premium members, I ran some benchmarks of the Ubuntu low-latency vs. generic kernels and I also tossed in the Liquorix kernel for benchmarking too.

At the beginning of January I posted some early LLVM Clang 6.0 benchmarks on AMD EPYC while in this article is comparing the tentative Clang 6.0 performance to that of the in-development GCC 8.0. Both compilers are now into their feature freeze and this testing looked at the performance of generated binaries both for generic x86_64 as well as being tuned for AMD's Zen "znver1" microarchitecture.

Over the past week and a half of running many benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the Linux KPTI and Retpoline patches for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, one of the most common test requests is some thorough benchmarks on older systems. Why that's important is with older (pre-Westmere) CPUs there isn't PCID (Process Context Identifier) support that's used by KPTI, which helps offset some of the performance loss. So for some test results to share today are two old ThinkPads from the Clarksfield and Penryn days compared to a newer Broadwell ThinkPad in looking at the performance difference.

While the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches were quick to land in the mainline Linux kernel for addressing the Meltdown CPU vulnerability, the "Retpoline" patches are still being worked on as the leading approach on the Linux side for dealing with the Spectre CPU vulnerability. The Retpoline patches are said to have little impact on performance, but here are our benchmarks of these kernel patches for seeing how they affect a variety of AMD and Intel systems.

Yet another one of the avenues we have been exploring with our Linux Page Table Isolation (KPTI) testing has been looking at any impact of this security feature in the wake of the Meltdown vulnerability when testing with an older Linux Long Term Support (LTS) release. In particular, when using a kernel prior to the PCID (Process Context Identifier) support in the Linux kernel that is used to lessen the impact of KPTI.

Continuing on with our Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) performance testing are some benchmark results when running tests within a virtual machine on Xeon class hardware.

Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.