June 22, 2011 -- As mentioned last week, a plethora of Linux power tests are on the way now that we have found an AC power meter with USB interface that works under Linux and we've been able to integrate nicely into the Phoronix Test Suite and its sensor monitoring framework. In this article is one of the first tests that have been completed using this power-measuring device as we monitored the Linux kernel power consumption for an old Intel Pentium 4 and ATI Radeon 9200 system for the past several kernel releases. Even this very old desktop system looks to be affected by the kernel power problems.

June 15, 2011 -- Phoronix Media has announced the immediate release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 (codenamed "Grimstad") as the planned quarterly update to their open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. The Phoronix Test Suite provides a framework for conducting qualitative and quantitative tests in a manner that is reproducible, easy-to-use, and fully automated.

June 13, 2011 -- Within the free software world, GCC has long been the dominant compiler with it being backed by the Free Software Foundation, it being the most well developed free compiler suite, and is a feature rich offering that is put out under the GNU GPLv3. As of late, LLVM has also been hitting the nail on the head. The Low-Level Virtual Machine with its C/C++ Clang compiler front-end offers great performance, is successful in building code-bases like the Linux kernel, its modular design allows the compiler infrastructure to be used in areas like graphics drivers, is under a BSD-style license, and carries numerous other advantages. Other open-source compilers have advanced too, including the release of PCC 1.0. Now there is a new and extremely interesting option to shake the open-source compiler world: PathScale is freely releasing the source to the EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite. EKOPath 4 is a high-performance compiler that up until now has been proprietary and costs nearly $2000 USD per license, but now it's open-source and can sharply outperform GCC in many computationally-intense workloads.

June 11, 2011 -- To much dismay, the major open-source announcement we have been waiting for, did not happen this week. Yes, this is the major open-source announcement that we have codenamed Dirndl. It is really that deserving of such a fitting codename. As our early tests have shown, it can dramatically speed-up the system's performance in computationally intensive workloads. No other open-source solution comes close in many of these tests, albeit there are some other proprietary brethren. In this article are some more details and performance results for what has been called "Dirndl" in technology terms.

June 08, 2011 -- As discovered by a Phoronix reader, there is a patch in the Linux 2.6.39.1 kernel that can partially improve the system's power performance. The patch by a Nokia engineer is entitled "cpuidle: menu: fixed wrapping timers at 4.294 seconds" and initial reports have said that it will lower the power consumption compared to the stock 2.6.39 kernel.

June 04, 2011 -- Earlier this week there were Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks looking at the overall system performance as well as the power consumption. Both of these Linux distributions had performed close to one another, as is expected considering the similarities in their kernel and other packages, but there were some discrepancies in the disk tests. Speculations in the forums were that some of the performance differences might be attributed to SELinux, so here are some tests seeing the performance impact of SELinux on Fedora 15.

June 03, 2011 -- On Sunday, the 5th of June, Phoronix.com will be turning seven years old. Here is to an early happy birthday for Phoronix, a look back, and what is coming up.

May 30, 2011 -- Those that follow my Twitter feed know that over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the various open-source and closed-source graphics drivers. But it was not like the usual Phoronix benchmarks simply comparing the driver performance. Instead it was to see how each driver performed under the various desktops / window managers now being used by modern Linux installations. In this article are the first results of this testing of Unity with Compiz, the classic GNOME desktop with Metacity, the classic GNOME desktop with Compiz, the GNOME Shell with Mutter, and the KDE desktop with KWin. These configurations were tested with both the open and closed-source NVIDIA and ATI/AMD Linux drivers.

May 27, 2011 -- Last weekend I mentioned that Wayland for MeeGo Tablet UX would be discussed and showed off at the 2011 MeeGo Conference that took place this week in San Francisco. Two sessions on the topic of Wayland took place, including one by Kristian Høgsberg, Wayland's creator. In this article are the slides that Kristian presented along with a few notes. This also shows off the plans to adopt Wayland in as soon as MeeGo 1.3, which will be released this October.

May 26, 2011 -- While we have already delivered a number of benchmarks from the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, surprisingly we have not yet published any new file-system benchmarks from this latest stable Linux kernel release. Fortunately, that has changed today with a fresh round of Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS file-system benchmarks on the Linux 2.6.39 kernel and compared to the preceding 2.6.38 and 2.6.37 kernel releases.