May 28, 2010 -- For the past six months we have been monitoring the performance of the very latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis across multiple systems. We have spotted a few regressions -- both positive and negative -- on occasion using our automated daily testing of the Linux kernel, but nothing like what we have encountered the past few days: the Linux 2.6.35 kernel performance has fallen hard. In fact, the performance has fallen very hard in a number of tests and right now, we would consider it a disaster. While the 2.6.35 code has not even seen its first release candidate yet, there are some massive performance drops in a variety of different tests that have yet to be corrected and nothing like we have encountered with previous kernel release cycles especially for a regression that has lived now for about one week.

May 24, 2010 -- With its continuing commitment to provide quarterly updates to its industry-leading automated testing and benchmarking platform, Phoronix Media has announced the immediate availability of Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 (codenamed "Lyngen").

May 24, 2010 -- Last week we published Arch Linux vs. Ubuntu benchmarks to finally lay to rest that for the overall system performance the speed of the rolling Arch Linux distribution is not too different from that of Ubuntu when running with similar package versions. One of the areas, however, where the performance was different with the "out of the box" experience was the OpenGL gaming where Ubuntu was using Compiz by default where as Arch had Metacity. This surprised many so we published another article entitled The Cost Of Running Compiz where we showed the performance penalties of a compositing window manager with different hardware and drivers. This led some to ask whether the performance of KWin also causes the OpenGL frame-rate to drop, so here are those KDE benchmarks.

May 21, 2010 -- Earlier this week we published benchmarks comparing Arch Linux and Ubuntu. There were only a few areas where the two Linux distributions actually performed differently with many of their core packages being similar, but one of the areas where the results were vastly different was with the OpenGL performance as Ubuntu uses Compiz by default (when a supported GPU driver is detected) where as Arch does not. This had surprised many within our forums so we decided to carry out a number of tests with different hardware and drivers to show off what the real performance cost is of running Compiz as a desktop compositing manager in different configurations.

May 12, 2010 -- The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has been in the mainline Linux kernel since Linux 2.6.20 in early 2007 and over time it has become one of the most widely used virtualization platforms on Linux. Ubuntu uses KVM, Fedora uses KVM, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has even switched from Xen to preferring KVM, among others. While occasionally we deliver new KVM virtualization benchmarks, we decided to investigate how the performance of KVM virtualization has changed -- if at all -- over the past two years for better or worse.

May 10, 2010 -- As we reported this morning, via a blog post and keynote to kick-off the start of the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week for engaging in Ubuntu 10.10 development activities, Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu Light and Ubuntu Unity. Ubuntu Light is a new spin of Ubuntu that is being offered up to OEMs that are looking to offer Ubuntu Linux as part of a dual-boot installation on their PCs. Unity is the new Ubuntu desktop interface that is used by Ubuntu Light.

April 29, 2010 -- Last week in a FreeBSD status report we talked about the Chromium web-browser support on FreeBSD improving through a new subscription program whereby most of the FreeBSD patches are being kept closed-source for some length of time before being committed back upstream as open-source and reaching the hands of the non-subscribers. This caused some to question the work, but the developer behind this FreeBSD-Chromium subscription program, Sprewell, has written an editorial that we are now publishing. This details his beliefs concerning the future of open-source software business models.

April 21, 2010 -- With the recent release of GCC 4.5 and the forthcoming release of LLVM 2.7 that is expected in the coming days, we have decided to see how the performance of GCC compares to that of LLVM. For this testing we have results from GCC 4.3/4.4/4.5 compared to LLVM with its GCC front-end (LLVM-GCC) and against Clang, which is the native C/C++ compiler front-end for the Low-Level Virtual Machine.

April 19, 2010 -- Last week GCC 4.5.0 entered the world with improvements to the experimental C++0x support, Graphite-powered automatic parallelization support, compatibility with new ARM processors, Intel Atom and AMD Orochi optimizations, link-time optimization, and GCC plug-in support. Over the weekend we decided to benchmark this major update to the GNU Compiler Collection to see how its performance compares to that of GCC 4.3 and 4.4.

April 16, 2010 -- One of the benefits of Btrfs besides offering competitive performance against other Linux file-systems and SSD optimizations is its support for sub-volumes and writable snapshots. While Btrfs is still in development and is not yet used as a default file-system by any Linux distribution, Red Hat has been looking to capitalize upon the capabilities of Btrfs by introducing support for system rollbacks into Fedora. The Btrfs-based system rollback support has been a feature for Fedora 13 so with the release of the Fedora 13 Beta earlier this week we decided to further investigate this feature.