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July 30, 2010 -- When testing out new hardware at Phoronix the systems are often running in an open environment atop a table rather than nestled away within an ATX case. While cases like the Raven RV02 and Fortress FT02 are wonderful to work with and use, when routinely swapping out hardware whether it's graphics cards or motherboards, it can be time consuming having to open up the chassis each time, remove any screws, pull out the existing hardware, and then install the new hardware. Running the hardware simply off its own cardboard box is often the quickest and most efficient path, but each system can occupy a lot of table space and lead to a rather cluttered work area. Fortunately, Lian Li has introduced a new ATX test bench called the PC-T60 that is designed for those enthusiasts or professionals that are frequently swapping out PC hardware.

July 28, 2010 -- Whether you are an owner of an ATI FirePro V3800 that retails for just over $100 USD, the proud owner of an ATI FirePro V8800 that goes for over $1,300 USD, or any of the FirePro products in-between, you will want to update your graphics driver when AMD puts out their next stable software update. Back in March AMD put out an amazing FirePro Linux driver that increased the performance of their workstation graphics cards already on the market (and the other Evergreen-based workstation cards that entered the market soon after) by an astonishing amount. Our independent tests of this proprietary Linux driver update found that the performance in some workstation applications had increased by up to 59% by simply installing this updated driver while other OpenGL tests had just improved rather modestly with 20%+ gains. AMD though is preparing to release another driver update for Microsoft Windows and Linux that ups their workstation graphics performance even more! We have run some tests of this new beta driver against their older driver with both their low-end and ultra-high-end FirePro products and have found the improvements again to be astonishing.

July 27, 2010 -- ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

July 26, 2010 -- As was mentioned in last Friday's article, Which Is Faster: Debian Linux or FreeBSD, tests of FreeBSD atop the ZFS file-system (rather than UFS2+S) are currently underway and those results are expected to be published in full later this week as the ZFS disk performance is compared directly to UFS2+S, UFS2+J, and also Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems. Today though we have a few ZFS performance numbers to share as we look at the performance of the new CAM-ATA sub-system on FreeBSD.

July 24, 2010 -- With Intel developers earlier this week expressing their plans to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa by the end of next month, which besides providing various shader compiler optimizations and being a better framework going forward is already set to correct 50+ bugs, we decided to try out this Mesa "GLSL2" compiler. However, as Intel explicitly stated they haven't tested this new GL Shading Language compiler that's been in development for months with any other hardware drivers (or even Gallium3D) besides their own Intel DRI driver, we decided to see how well it works with the open-source Radeon classic and Gallium3D drivers. It ended up being both good and bad.

July 23, 2010 -- Back in January, we published the first benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: the spin of Debian that replaces the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD kernel while retaining most of the same GNU user-land and it uses the GNU C library. With those original tests comparing Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Linux version ended up winning in 18 of the 27 tests. However, over the past six months, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has matured and it's also moved to using the FreeBSD 7.3 kernel by default (compared to 7.2 back in January) and the FreeBSD 8.0 kernel is also emerging as a viable option that can be obtained using Debian's package management system. Today we have updated test numbers looking at the performance of Debian with the FreeBSD kernel using two different notebooks where we ran the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD packages with both the FreeBSD 7.3 and 8.0 kernels, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, and then finally we tested the pure FreeBSD 7.3 and FreeBSD 8.0 operating systems.

July 21, 2010 -- Earlier this year we reviewed an Intel H55 motherboard and found it to perform well under Linux both in terms of compatibility with the latest Linux distributions at the time as well as the overall system performance with our slew of open-source benchmarks. Intel's H57 Chipset was launched at the same time, but with the very few differences between the H55 and H57 chipsets, its Linux support and performance is about the same. Today though we are reviewing the ECS H57H-MUS motherboard to see how this Intel H57 motherboard performs on Linux, which also offers a few extra features like USB 3.0 and Serial ATA 3.0 support.

July 19, 2010 -- At the end of last month the VDrift project did their first snapshot release in more than a year for this open-source drift racing game that's supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. The VDrift 2010-06-30 snapshot incorporates a great deal of changes, among which are a rewritten physics engine and a new deferred rendering engine that brings a great deal of visual improvements to this free software game. In this article are some screenshots on this OpenGL racing game and more of the new work found within this release.

July 16, 2010 -- Following yesterday's release of openSUSE 11.3 we tested this updated Linux operating system that's sponsored by Novell on an Intel Atom netbook and compared the performance to that of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Fedora 13. Here are the results.

July 14, 2010 -- Last quarter we compared the Catalyst and Mesa driver performance using an ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, compared the Gallium3D and classic Mesa drivers for ATI Radeon X1000 series hardware, and ultimately found that even with the ATI R500 class graphics cards the open-source driver is still playing catch-up to AMD's proprietary Catalyst Linux driver. In this article we have similar tests to show the performance disparity with ATI's much older R300 class hardware. Even with Radeon hardware that has had open-source support much longer, their drivers are not nearly as mature as an outdated Catalyst driver in the same configuration.

July 12, 2010 -- Last October I wrote about running Ubuntu 9.10 with older PC hardware, but over this past weekend I restored an even older Phoronix test system to see how it runs with the most recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and the very-latest Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot in relation to the older Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. This antiquated system has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB IDE hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200PRO AGP graphics card.

July 09, 2010 -- There is still three months left until Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" will be officially released along with the Ubuntu Netbook spin and the various other incarnations of this popular Linux distribution, but today we have some initial netbook tests of this next version of Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook may boast a new user-interface now that it is using the Unity Desktop, the changes that have taken place "under the hood" have led to some performance differences compared to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Netbook.

July 08, 2010 -- FreeBSD 8.1 is slated to be released this month as the first significant update to FreeBSD since the rollout of the 8.0 release last November. With the second release candidate of FreeBSD 8.1 having just been made available a few days back, we have conducted a set of tests comparing the performance of FreeBSD 8.1 RC2 versus FreeBSD 8.0 and an Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot.

July 07, 2010 -- Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.

July 05, 2010 -- Last week I put out new numbers showing the LLVMpipe performance with the latest Gallium3D code found in Mesa 7.9-devel. This Gallium3D driver accelerates all operations on the CPU rather than a GPU as a better software rasterizer than what is currently available for Linux, but even with a hefty Intel Core i7 CPU the OpenGL acceleration was still quite slow. In this article using an Intel Core i3 mobile CPU we are looking at the LLVMpipe performance again, but this time comparing it to the Intel graphics performance and also looking at the impact that the clock frequency and Hyper Threading have on this Gallium3D driver that heavily utilizes the Low-Level Virtual Machine for its CPU optimizations.

July 02, 2010 -- Not often do we look at computer accessories at Phoronix, but every once in a while some product looks interesting for whatever reason and we decide to try it out. With this review, we are looking at the AluStand from Artwizz. Artwizz is a company that is based in Berlin and was founded in just 2004 as a manufacturer of iPod and iPhone accessories, but since then they have branched out into developing other innovative products primarily designed for Apple devices, but other notebook computers too.

June 30, 2010 -- In previous articles I have hinted that at Phoronix we are working to take advantage of the Btrfs file-system within the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic to provide an interesting feature that will further expand our automated testing capabilities, but how does this file-system come into play? Well, here is what's being worked on and it should be of terrific value to many people.

June 29, 2010 -- Two months ago we published our initial benchmarks of LLVMpipe, the Gallium3D driver that accelerated commands on the CPU rather than any GPU and unlike other Linux software rasterizers is much faster due to leveraging LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) on the back-end. Since then we have published new ATI Gallium3D driver benchmarks and yesterday put out Nouveau Gallium3D driver benchmarks, so today we are providing updated LLVMpipe driver results to show how well Gallium3D's LLVMpipe driver can accelerate your OpenGL games with a modern processor.

June 28, 2010 -- In recent weeks we have published a number of benchmarks showcasing the ATI Gallium3D driver that supports the R300-R500 graphics processors as this open-source driver has been maturing at such an exciting rate with impressive changes and measurable performance gains over a short period of time. This ATI Gallium3D driver in most instances is outperforming the classic Radeon Mesa driver that supports up through the ATI Radeon X1000 series graphics cards. However, how is the Nouveau driver maturing that supports NVIDIA's wide-range of GeForce graphics cards? In February we published some Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks, but now we have a fresh set of numbers from three different NVIDIA graphics cards and we also compare the Nouveau Gallium3D driver to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

June 26, 2010 -- Three years ago Intel had released PowerTop, an open-source utility for Linux that would analyze how well your laptop was conserving power and would allow users to easily tune their system for maximum battery life via simple power optimizations. By simply running this utility, some users were able to significantly extend their battery life. However, is this utility still useful and needed with a modern Linux desktop? The most recent release of PowerTop (v1.11) was a year and a half ago, so we are seeing how well PowerTop is still able to reduce the power consumption of Intel notebooks/netbooks running Linux.