The Most Popular Linux Hardware Reviews & Featured Articles Over 20 Years
There have been more than 5,100 Linux hardware reviews and other multi-page featured articles over the past 20 years on Phoronix. For those wanting to relive some of the most interesting and exciting moments, below is a look at the most viewed featured articles/reviews on Phoronix. As a reminder if you've enjoyed all of the daily content over the years, there's a Phoronix Premium birthday special running through the end of the weekend to help support the site at a discounted rate.
So let's jump back with the most exciting moments from SplashTop for Linux on motherboards to open-source AMD moments to cross-OS comparisons, Wayland history, Steam on Linux, and more.
ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser
The good folks over at ASUS have sent over the P5E3 Deluxe, which is based upon Intel's new X38 Chipset and continues in the usual ASUS fashion of pushing new (and often unexpected) innovations onto the motherboard. Without spoiling the review of this motherboard that will be published shortly, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is one of the most innovative motherboards we have seen to date and it packs one very exciting and unusual feature. Embedded onto the P5E3 Deluxe is a Linux environment that features a Firefox-rebranded web browser and the Skype VoIP client! Within five seconds of turning on this $360 USD gaming/enthusiast motherboard, you can be using Linux and surfing the Internet. On this motherboard the feature is known as ASUS Express Gate, which is powered by something called SplashTop. SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop being created by DeviceVM. SplashTop isn't even launching for a few more days (October 10), but in this article we have more details on this embedded Linux environment as well as screenshots and our thoughts with what will hopefully come next for this Linux environment.
Touring Chernobyl In 2010
I just returned to the United States after being in Ukraine the past five days over Easter weekend. The purpose of this trip was to explore the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and surrounding areas -- Kyiv, Pripyat, the Red Forest, etc. Contrary to some initial beliefs, it was not an April Fools' Joke. Due to the great interest in Chernobyl among those interested in science and technology whether it be due to the fascination with nuclear power or finding Chernobyl popularized by video games, documentaries, and the like, I have published my collection of these photographs of Chernobyl showing what the area looks like in 2010 -- just days prior to the 24th anniversary of this catastrophic disaster -- along with some of my thoughts and information collected from this journey.
Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks
Over the past few weeks we have been providing several in-depth articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux. We had begun by providing Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks and had found the performance of this popular Linux distribution to become slower with time and that article was followed up with Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks and other articles looking at the state of Ubuntu's performance. In this article, we are now comparing the 64-bit performance of Ubuntu 8.10 against the latest test releases of OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1.
Raspberry Pi 3 Benchmarks vs. Eight Other ARM Linux Boards
On Friday my Raspberry Pi 3 arrived for benchmarking. For our first benchmarks of this Cortex-A53 64-bit ARM $35 development board is a comparison against eight other ARMv7 and ARMv8 development boards running their official Linux distributions while carrying out a range of benchmarks. Here are those raw performance results along with a performance-per-dollar comparison for additional insight into this low-cost ARM development board.
AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source
While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.
The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders
In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small -- just over 200 lines of code -- but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.
The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux
Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community. We have been granted unprecedented access to share with you their once unknown driver development model.
Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?
Often when we are preparing for cross-distribution comparisons or benchmarks of different operating systems (like our recent Mac OS X 10.6 vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks) we are often asked to include Arch Linux in the mix. This is usually on the basis of including a rolling-release distribution to provide a performance look at a constantly evolving distribution with many of the most recent open-source packages rather than a traditional distribution with packages that may be months older. Many of those requesting Arch be included in our testing mix also claim that Arch performs significantly faster than Ubuntu and our usual test candidates. The main reason we do not deliver many benchmarks of Arch, Gentoo, or other distributions that use a rolling release approach is that they are not very reproducible with their results since their packages are frequently changing and there are more end-user customizations going on compared to most other distributions. However, to test the performance claims of Arch versus others, we have compared the performance of the newest Arch 2010.05 media against Ubuntu Linux.
Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes
Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.
Ubuntu: 32-bit v. 64-bit Performance
While 64-bit support is now considered common for both Intel and AMD processors, many Linux (as well as Windows) users are uncertain whether to use a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system with there being advantages for both paths. With this being the last Phoronix article for 2006, we decided to take this opportunity to look at the common question of whether to use 32-bit or 64-bit software. In this article, we will be comparing the i386 and x86_64 performance with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 1 to see how the numbers truly stack up.
AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer On Ubuntu Linux
Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On A $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop
When carrying out our Windows vs. Linux benchmarks we normally are doing so on interesting high-end hardware but for today's benchmarking is a look at how a $199 USD laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor compares between Windows 10 as it's shipped on the laptop against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.
The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison
Last month I alluded to a 40-way graphics card comparison being worked on at Phoronix. This comparison is to extensively compare the performance of the open and closed-source drivers for each graphics card and to comprehensively comment on other areas of the Linux graphics driver support. Not only is the OpenGL performance being evaluated, but the thermal performance, CPU utilization, and power consumption is being looked at too. Being published today to mark the beginning of the Oktoberfest 2011 articles are the ATI/AMD Radeon results. This includes 28 of the 40 graphics cards, with GPUs as old as the Radeon X800XL and as new as the AMD Radeon HD 6950.
12-Core ARM Cluster Benchmarked Against Atom, Ivy Bridge, Fusion
Last week I shared my plans to build a low-cost, 12-core, 30-watt ARMv7 cluster running Ubuntu Linux. The ARM cluster that is built around the PandaBoard ES development boards is now online and producing results... Quite surprising results actually for a low-power Cortex-A9 compute cluster. Results include performance-per-Watt comparisons to Intel Atom and Ivy Bridge processors along with AMD's Fusion APU.
Ubuntu 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, 64-bit Benchmarks
Coming up in our forums was a testing request to compare the performance of Linux between using 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit kernels. This is coming after Linus Torvalds has spoke of 25% performance differences between kernels using CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G and those without this option that allows 32-bit builds to address up to 4GB of physical RAM on a system. We decided to compare the performance of the 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit kernels on a modern desktop system and here are the results.
Ubuntu 15.10: KVM vs. Xen vs. VirtualBox Virtualization Performance
Our latest benchmarks of Ubuntu 15.10 are looking at the performance of this latest Linux distribution release when comparing the performance of guests using KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox virtualization from the same system.
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X + Ryzen 9 3900X Offer Incredible Linux Performance But With A Big Caveat
After weeks of anticipation, we can now share how the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X performance is under Linux. These first Zen 2 processors do indeed deliver a significant improvement over Zen/Zen+ processors and also battle Intel's latest 14nm CPUs but for Linux users there is one big, unfortunate issue right now.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland
With the continued speculation and FUD about the future of Wayland at a time when Canonical is investing heavily into their own Mir Display Server alternative, Eric Griffith with input from Daniel Stone have written an article for Phoronix where they lay out all the facts. The "Wayland Situation" is explained with first going over the failings of X, the fixings of Wayland, common misconceptions about X and Wayland, and then a few other advantages to Wayland. For anyone interested in X/Wayland or the Linux desktop at a technical level, it's an article certainly worth reading!
Java Performance: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista
Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative.
Valve's Gabe Newell Talks Linux Steam Client, Source Engine
For those that have doubted the exclusive Phoronix claims for quite a while now that the Steam client and Source Engine are in fact being ported to Linux, the doubts can be nearly laid to rest. Even I began to wonder how long it would take before the clients for their popular games would be publicly released under Linux. However, after confirming the information perhaps a bit too soon, their level of Linux interest is much more clear after spending a day at their offices. A meeting topped off the day with Gabe Newell regarding Linux where he sounded more like a Linux saint than an ex-Microsoft employee. Valve does have some great plans for Linux beyond just shipping the client versions of Steam and their popular games on the Source Engine.
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