April 28, 2012 -- It has been a while since last running any tests of PathScale's EKOPath compiler, but in this preview article are some AMD FX-8150 "Bulldozer" benchmarks of the EKOPath compiler compared to GCC 4.7.0, LLVM/Clang 3.1 SVN, and AMD Open64 4.5.1.

April 19, 2012 -- After looking recently at the impact on performance and power consumption of various Linux desktop environments running under Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox), there were requests by many Phoronix readers to look at the impact of KDE on 3D gaming. KDE's KWin compositing window manager offers several options that can be easily changed that have a direct result on the Linux system's performance for full-screen OpenGL games.

April 18, 2012 -- After looking at how Intel's Sandy Bridge processor performance has evolved with the new GCC 4.7 compiler and Apple's forthcoming LLVM 3.1 with Clang, here are benchmark results from the AMD FX-8150 "Bulldozer" Eight-Core processor with GCC 4.7.0 and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.1 development code along with looking at the performance impact of various compiler tuning flags for this latest-generation AMD CPU. Making things even more interesting, AMD's Open64 4.5.1 compiler was also tossed into the testing mix.

April 06, 2012 -- While we have seen that Intel's Sandy Bridge is doing well on the new GCC 4.7 compiler, has AMD's Bulldozer CPU architecture advanced at all for this leading multi-platform compiler? Up today are benchmarks of GCC 4.7.0 -- with comparative benchmarks going back to GCC 4.4 -- from an AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core Bulldozer setup.

April 05, 2012 -- There's growing interest in being able to build the mainline Linux kernel with the LLVM/Clang compiler as an alternative to the kernel's long-standing love-affair with GCC.

April 02, 2012 -- After delivering benchmarks in March showing the performance gains of GCC 4.7 on Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, here's a look at how the latest LLVM/Clang 3.1 compiler from Apple is shaping up for these latest Intel CPUs.

March 29, 2012 -- Next week at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be speaking about their Linux device driver development experiences and will go as far as calling for all proprietary drivers to be killed for good. They talk not just about killing proprietary drivers for Linux, but for all operating systems. Can the plans they lay out to kill all proprietary drivers work or is this just a big pipe-dream?

March 27, 2012 -- After performing a fresh Linux installation, most users are concerned with customizing their desktop or application set for their needs, but an increasing number of enthusiasts tend to be looking at their kernel. The Zen kernel was once very popular, but of increasing popularity amongst die-hard Linux enthusiasts is the Zen-related Liquorix kernel. While it claims to offer superior performance for common workloads, is this really the case? Here are some benchmarks of the stock Ubuntu 12.04 kernel versus the 3.2 kernel offered by Liquorix.

March 26, 2012 -- Earlier this month I benchmarked all the major Linux file-systems of Ubuntu 12.04: ReiserFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS. While Btrfs performed well with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it was not always the fastest although it does offer the most advanced feature-set. For those looking to tune a Btrfs file-system for performance, published now are some reference benchmarks showing the Linux Btrfs performance with varying mount options.

March 18, 2012 -- Back in January I wrote about how open-source compilers are quickly maturing for Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs and offering early support for Intel Ivy Bridge and Intel Haswell processors. Both GCC and LLVM have been quick to take advantage of the new instruction set extensions and other capabilities of these latest -- and very impressive -- Intel processors. With the release of GCC 4.7 quickly approaching, here is an updated set of GNU Compiler Collection Fortran/C/C++ benchmarks from the Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition test-bed.