This week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Meltdown mitigation impact on BSD vs. Linux as well as some tests of DragonFly's stabilized HAMMER2 while for your viewing pleasure this weekend are a variety of general BSD vs. Linux benchmarks while using the newly-released DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, FreeBSD 11.1, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04, and Intel's Clear Linux.

Back in December Amazon rolled out Amazon Linux 2 as a big upgrade to its Linux distribution intended for the EC2 compute cloud as well as on-site via VMware/VirtualBox/Hyper-V virtualization. Amazon Linux 2 rolled out an upgraded Linux kernel, compiler, and many other packages as well as switched to using systemd. Coming out this week was Amazon Linux 2 Candidate 2 as the next installment of this long-term support Linux platform.

Our latest Windows vs. Linux benchmarking interest has been seeing how the AMD Ryzen 7 performance compares with the latest operating systems / Linux distributions. We have recently posted some Windows 10 vs. Windows WSL vs. Windows Linux benchmarks, relative Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact tests on Windows vs. Linux, and other benchmarks but has mostly been done with Intel or server hardware. For those curious, today's tests were done with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 platform.

With the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release fast approaching and it being the latest Long-Term Support release, the latest benchmarking at Phoronix has been looking at how the Ubuntu LTS performance has evolved going as far back as the Ubuntu 10.04.0 LTS "Lucid Lynx" release. On three systems where supported Ubuntu 10.04 / 12.04 / 14.04 / 16.04 / 18.04 were tested each time.

With Debian having been added to the Microsoft Store earlier this month for running Debian 9 on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) plus in wanting to do some fresh updates prior to Microsoft shipping their Spring Creators Update, here are some fresh benchmarks of various Linux distributions and their raw performance, the current major Linux distributions available on WSL, and then also the native Windows 10 performance in the various supported tests.

The latest in our Windows versus Linux benchmarking is looking at the relative performance impact on both Linux and Windows of their Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques. This round of tests were done on Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Clear Linux when having an up-to-date system on each OS where there is Spectre/Meltdown protection and then repeating the same benchmarks after reverting/disabling the security functionality.

Here are our latest Windows 10 versus Linux benchmarks for the week. This benchmarking dance is looking at the Windows performance compared to Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and Solus Linux in various workloads. Among the tests this time around were looking at the performance with Go, Java, Perl, Python, FFmpeg, and more.

Given how fiercely the latest open-source AMD Linux driver code is running now up against NVIDIA's long-standing flagship Linux GPU driver, you might be curious how well that driver stacks up against the Radeon Software driver on Windows? Well, you are in luck as here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 as well as the GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 Ti while being tested both under Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while using the latest AMD/NVIDIA drivers on each platform.

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS set to be released next month and its final package configuration quickly falling into place, we have begun firing up some benchmarks for seeing how this Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release is comparing to various other Linux distributions. Up first as part of this series of benchmarks is using an AMD EPYC workstation/server for seeing how the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS performance compares to six other Linux distributions.

Two years and a few days since the Vulkan 1.0 release is now marked by a new significant milestone for this cross-platform graphics/compute API... It's not a new Vulkan release today, but Vulkan is now available on Apple's iOS and macOS platforms! Here are the details with the embargo just expiring on Vulkan now on macOS/iOS but still without the official support from Apple.

Back in December was our most recent round of Windows Subsystem for Linux benchmarking with Windows 10 while since then both Linux and Windows have received new stable updates, most notably for mitigating the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Windows 10 WSL performance against Linux using the latest updates as of this week while also running some comparison tests too against Docker on Windows and Oracle VM VirtualBox.

For those curious about the state of Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver relative to the company's closed-source Windows OpenGL driver, here are some fresh benchmark results when making use of an Intel Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" processor with UHD Graphics 630 and testing from Windows 10 Pro x64 against Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel and Mesa 18.1-dev, and then Intel's own Clear Linux distribution.

For those wondering how Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) performance is now after being mitigated for the recent Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, here are benchmarks of five Linux distributions comparing the performance to last December prior to the Linux kernel mitigations coming about to now.

With many of you likely upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS upon release and the recommendation to use disk encryption as important as ever on any important system especially laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" and looking at the current performance overhead of using the current "home directory encryption" and "full disk encryption" options available to Ubuntu Linux users.

With this morning's debut of the openSUSE Leap 15.0 public beta that is derived from the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 source code, I was curious to check it out and also run some benchmarks. For seeing how the current beta performance is stacking up I ran some benchmarks against openSUSE Leap 42.3, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, and a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Last week when sharing the results of tweaking Ubuntu 17.10 to try to make it run as fast as Clear Linux, it didn't take long for Phoronix readers to share their opinions on Arch Linux and the request for some optimized Arch Linux benchmarks against Clear Linux. Here are some results of that testing so far in carrying out a clean Arch Linux build with some basic optimizations compared to using Antergos Minimal out-of-the-box, Ubuntu Server, and Clear Linux.

Even with the overhead of having both KPTI and Retpoline kernel support in place, our recent Linux distribution benchmarks have shown Intel's Clear Linux generally outperforming the more popular distributions. But if applying some basic performance tweaks, can Ubuntu 17.10 perform like Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks looking at a few factors.

With Linux distributions being patched since last week's Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, here are benchmarks on some of the prominent distributions looking at their performance impact since being patched. Tested from an Intel Core i7 8700K system was CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Yesterday Intel landed KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline support in their Clear Linux distribution. Given that one of the pillars of this Intel Open-Source Technology Center platform is on delivering optimal Linux performance, I was curious to see how its performance was impacted. Here are before/after benchmarks on seven different systems ranging from low-end Pentium hardware to Xeon servers.

Following the move by Linux to introduced Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) to address the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs, DragonFlyBSD has implemented better user/kernel separation to address this issue. While the Linux performance hit overall was minor, in our tests carried out so far the DragonFlyBSD kernel changes are causing more widespread slowdowns.

Overall most of our benchmarks this week of the new Linux Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patches coming as a result of the Meltdown vulnerability have showed minimal impact overall on system performance. The exceptions have obviously been with workloads having high kernel interactions like demanding I/O cases and in terms of real-world impact, databases. But when testing VMs there's been some minor impact more broadly than bare metal testing and also Wine performance has been impacted. The latest having been benchmarked is seeing if the Docker performance has been impacted by the KPTI patches to see if it's any significant impact since overall the patched system overhead certainly isn't anything close to how it was initially hyped by some other media outlets.

The latest in our streak of year-end benchmarking is seeing how Linux performance has evolved over the course of 2017. For that we tested Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution as well as Ubuntu using releases from the start of the year to their current state for seeing how the performance compares using the same system.

Complementing our recent Amazon EC2 Linux cloud distribution benchmarks, here are some fresh test results when comparing various Linux distributions when benchmarking them as guest VMs with the KVM hypervisor.

With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.

Back in October I did some basic tests of the BSDs on AMD EPYC while now with having more of our extensive Linux testing of AMD EPYC complete, I went back and did a few fresh tests of the BSDs with an AMD EPYC 7601 processor housed within the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026.

Over the past week I have carried out some Radeon and NVIDIA Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks. While not quite as interesting as those discrete GPU comparisons, while having the Windows 10 Pro x64 Fall Creator's Update around and testing from the Core i7 8700K, I also ran some Windows vs. Linux tests for the integrated UHD Graphics.

A few days back we published some Windows 10 vs. Linux gaming benchmarks with two Radeon graphics cards. For putting those numbers into better perspective, here are the results now when adding in two competing NVIDIA graphics cards on both operating systems.

With the recent Windows 10 Fall Creator's Update there were some improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) particularly around boosting the I/O performance (though further WSL performance work is coming), so this week I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 WSL with its openSUSE and Fedora options. For additional perspective I also compared the performance to running benchmarks with Linux containers on Docker under Windows 10 and lastly the "bare metal" Linux performance.

As we end out November, here is a fresh look at the current Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator's Update versus Ubuntu 17.10 with the latest Linux 4.15 kernel and Mesa 17.4-dev Radeon graphics driver stack as we see how various games compete under Windows 10 and Linux with these latest AMD drivers on the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

It's been a few months since last running a Linux distribution / operating system comparison on Amazon's EC2 public cloud, but given the ever-advancing state of Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks when testing the Amazon Linux AMI, Clear Linux, Debian 9.2, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP3, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.