March 02, 2011 -- By now you have likely read all about the features announced for Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" thus far along with seeing plenty of screenshots and videos showing off Launchpad, Mission Control, Versions, the improved mail client, and much more. But how does Apple's next-generation operating system perform? Well, here is a look at the performance of Mac OS X 10.7, including what are likely the first public benchmarks of Mac OS X Lion.

February 21, 2011 -- In this article we are looking at how Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD scale across multiple cores. Benchmarked are CentOS 5.5, Fedora 14, PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1, and OpenIndiana b148 as we see how the performance differs when running on one, two, three, four, and six cores, plus when Intel Hyper Threading is enabled.

February 14, 2011 -- In recent weeks we have been talking about Intel's Linux advancements as it concerns their latest "Sandy Bridge" generation of processors with integrated graphics (and there are a few more articles on the way), but how is their latest open-source driver stack performing on the older generations of Intel integrated graphics? Previously, the Intel Linux graphics have been the real loser in our multi-OS comparisons, but is this still the case? At least when comparing the Linux and Mac OS X performance on Intel 945 hardware, yes, the Mesa driver falls behind at OpenGL acceleration.

December 10, 2010 -- Earlier this week on Phoronix were new benchmarks of Ubuntu Linux vs. Mac OS X using a new Apple Mac Book Pro with an Intel Core i5 CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor. When looking at the tests results overall it ended up being a competitive race between these two Microsoft Windows competitors. In some areas, like the OpenCL computational performance, Apple's operating system commanded a sizable lead. In other areas, like the OpenGL graphics performance, Ubuntu Linux backed by NVIDIA's official but proprietary driver was in control. Here's an additional set of tests showing the measurable leads of NVIDIA Linux over Mac OS X with Apple's NVIDIA driver.

December 06, 2010 -- Back in May, we published benchmarks of Mac OS X 10.6.3 vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04, along with other times, looking at the performance of Apple's Mac OS X operating system relative to Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. In most of those articles though we used Mac Mini computers, but now with a new Mac Book Pro in our labs with the latest Apple/Intel hardware, along with the most recent versions of each operating system, we have carried out a new set of tests that is also more in-depth than our earlier published benchmarks.

November 22, 2010 -- Earlier today we put out benchmarks of ZFS on Linux via a native kernel module that will be made publicly available to bring this Sun/Oracle file-system over to more Linux users. Now though as a bonus we happen to have new benchmarks of the latest OpenSolaris-based distributions, including OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and Augustiner-Schweinshaxe, compared to PC-BSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

November 15, 2010 -- Earlier today there was the unexpected surprise of Oracle releasing Solaris 11 Express. There wasn't any public betas or preview releases of Oracle Solaris 11 Express and the last time we got to look at anything new from the OpenSolaris code-base was months ago before Oracle decided to dismantle that once promising open-source Sun project. In the hours following the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express we tried it out on a few different test systems. Here is a brief, visual tour of Oracle Solaris 11 Express for those interested.

October 18, 2010 -- As was reported recently, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port now has limited support for handling ZFS file-systems and its stock kernel has been upgraded against that of FreeBSD 8.1. Due to the upgraded kernel we ran a quick set of benchmarks to see how the performance of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to that of Debian Linux.

September 15, 2010 -- With the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 a few weeks back we decided to run some benchmarks of this operating system against PC-BSD 8.1, OpenSolaris b134, and Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. For those unfamiliar with Nexenta Core Platform, it is an operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a Linux user-land provided by the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron" package repository, complete with apt-get support for easy package installation.

August 26, 2010 -- Yesterday we looked at the performance of Apple's "Snow Leopard Graphics Update" for Mac OS X 10.6.4 designed to enhance both the image quality and rendering performance for OpenGL games and applications. For testing their graphics update we benchmarked Mac OS X 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, and 10.6.4 with the Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 installed and benchmarked the Apple OpenGL performance against Ubuntu Linux. The results were mixed showing Apple still has room to optimize their OpenGL stack compared to NVIDIA's Linux implementation and in not all areas did this package update result in performance enhancements. After we finished that OpenGL comparison, we decided to see how the OpenCL performance compares between Mac OS X 10.6.4 and Ubuntu Linux 10.04.1 LTS. We tested the Open Computing Language on both the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and on the NVIDIA GPU.