Software Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 904 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for software. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

After earlier in the week delivering solid-state drive file-system benchmarks in comparing the Linux 3.15 FS performance to Linux 3.14 stable, now it's time to do a Linux 3.14 vs. 3.14 file-system performance comparison with a traditional hard drive. The file-systems being benchmarked here are EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs.

Now that kernel development activity is settling down for the Linux 3.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks of the EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems compared to the stable Linux 3.14 kernel performance.

Now that things are settling down with Linux 3.15, here's some fresh benchmarks of the Linux 3.15 kernel off an ASUS Zenbook Prime.

A common benchmark request at Phoronix lately has been to compare the Xen PV (para-virtualization) performance to Xen HVM (Hardware-assisted virtualization). Well, now that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released, here's some benchmarks from within Amazon's EC2 compute cloud when comparing Ubuntu 14.04 Server PV and HVM instances.

A few days ago I did my latest benchmarks of GCC vs. LLVM/Clang and that was using an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor. The tables have now turned and in this article are GCC vs. LLVM Clang benchmarks of the AMD Athlon 5350 APU with four Jaguar CPU cores.

Following my most recent GCC 4.9 benchmarks for the open-source compiler that should be officially released next week, I ran some benchmarks of the GCC compiler results against LLVM's Clang 3.5 compiler in its latest SVN state. Here's the data for those curious how the very latest compiler code is comparing between GCC and LLVM/Clang.

For those curious about the impact of modern compiler tuning CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when using the GCC 4.9 compiler with an Intel Core i7 "Haswell" processor, here are many benchmarks of many C/C++ code-bases when testing a variety of compiler optimization levels and other flags.

With last weekend marking an update to the most commonly used Wayland Live CD, I decided to try it out and the different desktop environments that it ships using all the latest code, including the latest development code of Wayland/Weston and the various tool-kits.

Our latest benchmarking of Ubuntu 14.04 is looking at the 2D X11 and 3D OpenGL performance of six different desktop environments when benchmarked on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The tested desktops included Unity, Xfce, KDE, LXDE, GNOME Shell, and Openbox.

Phoronix Test Suite 5.0-Plavsk ships today with an experimental / tech preview user-interface powered by HTML5 and other new features to bolster the software's capabilities for open-source benchmarking and automated testing.

Following our recent HDD benchmarking and solid-state drive testing of the Linux 3.14 kernel with various file-systems, for this weekend article we have done more tests of Btrfs on Linux 3.14 when trying out various Btrfs mount options.

After last week delivering HDD file-system benchmarks on the in-development Linux 3.14 kernel, here are benchmarks of the Btrfs, EXT4, and F2FS file-systems from a solid-state drive.

Now that most of "the scary stuff" for Linux 3.14 has been taken care of, it's time to benchmark this next major kernel release. The Linux 3.14 kernel has many major features added so there's plenty of benchmarks abound while in this article is a comparison of the 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14 Git kernels from an Intel Ultrabook.

After a few days ago showing LLVM Clang 3.4 running very well on AMD's Kaveri APU, here are some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.2, the latest GCC 4.9 development snapshot, and LLVM Clang 3.4 from an Intel Core i5 "Haswell" system running Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel.

The latest kernel benchmarking that happened at Phoronix was testing every major Linux kernel release from Linux 3.3 through the latest stable Linux 3.13 release from an Intel Sandy Bridge system to see how the kernel performance has evolved during the hardware's lifetime for key subsystems.

After earlier this week running GCC 4.8.2 vs. GCC 4.9 development snapshot benchmarks on the AMD A10-7850K Kaveri APU, up for testing today are new compiler tests from this new high-end APU comparing GCC 4.9 in its current development form to LLVM Clang 3.4. This GCC 4.9 vs. LLVM Clang 3.4 compiler performance comparison is more competitive than some of the past compiler comparisons and does hold a few surprises.

Our latest Linux benchmarks of AMD's new "Kaveri" APU with Steamroller processor cores is comparing the GCC 4.8.2 compiler performance to the very latest GCC 4.9 compiler snapshot to see how the performance is fairing for this next Free Software Foundation compiler release due out within the next few months.

For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some extra benchmarks of various Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell HD Graphics when using an Ubuntu 14.04 Linux development snapshot with the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.0.1. The processors tested included the Core i3 2120, Core i5 2500K, Core i5 3470, Core i7 3770K, Core i3 4130, and Core i7 4770K. These tests appear to represent a huge drawback in performance for Intel Haswell on Linux compared to earlier results.

With 2013 ending, here's the most popular Linux, open-source, and hardware stories covered in 2013 on Phoronix. Enjoy and look forward to many more great and exclusive Linux articles on Phoronix in 2014.

After earlier this month delivering LLVM Clang 3.3/3.4 benchmarks for the new compiler infrastructure out of Apple, today are results that directly compare the new LLVM Clang 3.4 performance against the stable GCC 4.8.2 compiler and GCC 4.9.0 development compiler under various C/C++ benchmarks.

The Christmas benchmarks we have to share on Phoronix today are of testing the XFS, Btrfs, and EXT4 file-systems on the Linux 3.13 development kernel compared to Linux 3.12 from a high-performance hard drive. Earlier this month results were shared on Phoronix that indicated file-systems on a solid-state drive slowing down with this new Linux kernel, but is that also the case for HDDs?

While extensive benchmarks of the GCC 4.9 development compiler are currently ongoing, here's a preview of the performance that the GNU Compiler Collection is set to offer in 2014 with its next major update. For this article an Intel Pentium "Haswell" dual-core processor was tested on a GCC 4.9 development snapshot and compared to GCC 4.8.2 and GCC 4.7.3 in a wide variety of C/C++ workloads. New LLVM Clang 3.4 benchmarks are also happening.

The release of LLVM 3.4 is imminent and with the major compiler infrastructure upgrade comes update to the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end, LLDB debugger, and other LLVM sub-projects. LLVM 3.4 is a very righteous release and in celebration of its forthcoming release, it's back into compiler benchmarking season at Phoronix.

Our initial file-system testing of EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and F2FS from the Linux 3.13 kernel appear to reveal that the performance overall is slower than when using the Linux 3.12 kernel on the same software/hardware configuration.

While I'm waiting for development activity on the Linux 3.13 kernel to settle down a bit more before delivering comprehensive benchmarks looking at the Linux 3.13 kernel performance changes across the various covered subsystems, up this morning are some early benchmarks of the Linux 3.13 Git kernel and benchmarking every major release going back to Linux 3.9.

For those that may have some time this holiday weekend and are looking to better enhance the performance of Ubuntu's open-source graphics drivers, one of the easiest ways to do so is by enabling the Oibaf repository for easily downloading and installing newer versions of the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers and other X.Org related components. Here are some more details and current benchmarks of enabling the Oibaf PPA over Ubuntu 13.10.

It's been a while since last putting out any hardware-accelerated video decode benchmarks of NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU). However, after updating qVDPAUtest to support building on modern platforms, here's a round of thirteen NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards being benchmarked under VDPAU.

How does the Linux kernel performance compare if simply bouncing between some of the recent long-term kernel releases? Well, to try to answer that question on Phoronix today we have benchmarks of the Linux 3.0.101, 3.4.68, 3.10.18, and 3.12.0 kernel releases tested from an AMD Opteron system with Radeon graphics.

With the Fedora 20 beta coming up I decided to see where the latest Fedora 20 packages are now at for their support of Wayland and the GNOME Shell Wayland session. In particular, looking at whether the session is still buggy and how the XWayland performance is for Linux gaming.

While the Ubuntu 13.10 desktop isn't using Mir/XMir by default, the packages are available within the archive for those wanting to test out the next-generation display server for Ubuntu. To see how the 2D/3D performance is when running under XMir with the Unity System Compositor, I ran some new benchmarks using this week's Ubuntu 13.10 release.