May 17, 2013 -- Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

May 13, 2013 -- With the merge window on the feature-rich Linux 3.10 kernel having been closed, the usual roundabout of Phoronix benchmarking of the Linux kernel has commenced. In our initial testing of the F2FS file-system on Linux 3.10, however, yields negative performance changes.

May 07, 2013 -- One of the prominent features to be introduced with the LLVM 3.3 release this summer is the SLP Vectorizer. Introduced in the LLVM 3.2 release was the LLVM Loop Vectorizer for vectorizing loops while the new SLP Vectorizer is about optimizing straight-line code by merging multiple scalars into vectors.

April 27, 2013 -- Most often when delivering new compiler benchmarks on Phoronix whether it be for GCC, LLVM/Clang, or an alternative Linux code compiler, the testing is most commonly done with Intel hardware. The Intel compiler testing is done since Intel CPUs are predominantly used in the developer world and we happen to have a lot more Intel hardware samples around than AMD CPUs. However, for those curious how the LLVM/Clang 3.3 performance is stacking up, here are some GCC and LLVM/Clang benchmarks from an AMD FX-8350 "Vishera" system running Ubuntu 13.04 Linux.

April 23, 2013 -- Generally when delivering new Linux compiler benchmarks on Phoronix it's from x86/ARM hardware within the past two years. It's the most recent generations of hardware that excites us the most and generally where the professional Linux software developers are focusing their time and resources. However, after seeing the recent LLVM/Clang 3.3 performance improvements for this forthcoming open-source compiler release, we decided to go back a bit in CPU history.

April 19, 2013 -- Last month I delivered benchmarks showing LLVM/Clang 3.3 offers performance improvements and then LLVM/Clang 3.3 is very competitive to GCC 4.8. For further confirming this information, LLVM/Clang 3.3 SVN development benchmarks were carried out from an entirely different system to confirm the earlier findings. LLVM/Clang 3.3 is indeed much faster over its predecessor in a wide variety of Linux benchmarks.

April 15, 2013 -- The Liquorix kernel is a modified version of the Linux kernel with out-of-tree patches and a kernel configuration that is highly-optimized for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. It's been one year since last benchmarking the Liquorix kernel against a vanilla Linux kernel, but now we have some benchmarks of the Liquorix 3.8 kernel compared to the latest stable Linux kernel.

April 07, 2013 -- Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It's interesting.

March 29, 2013 -- Last week, Wayland/Weston was forked by a long-time contributor, Scott Moreau. The fork of the Wayland/Weston display server ended up becoming known as Northfield/Norwood, following disagreements within the Wayland development camp. Scott Moreau was ultimately banned from the Wayland mailing list and IRC channel, so he's written an exclusive, independent article for Phoronix to explain his actions and why he felt a fork of the Wayland display server protocol and the reference Weston compositor were necessary.

March 13, 2013 -- Fluendo, the well-known company that backs the development of GStreamer and has also sponsored projects like PiTiVi and other open-source multimedia projects, has released Codec Pack 18. Special about Codec Pack 18 is that it's intended for use with GStreamer 1.0.