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While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload. Unfortunately, with there being hundreds of different Linux kernel configuration options, this is often a deterrent for any hobbyist to sit down and invest a great deal of time in testing out the different combinations of kernel options to generate the best performance for one's needs. Even for the experienced professionals the process of tuning the kernel configuration for a specific workload can require significant man hours and manual testing. But how would it be if you could find the optimal kernel configuration for your specific workload without any real human involvement? Well, it's possible to quite easily generate an ideal Linux kernel configuration in an autonomous manner.

Yesterday we delivered benchmarks showing how the open-source ATI Radeon graphics driver stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is comparing to older releases of the proprietary ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Sadly, the latest open-source ATI driver still is no match even for a two or four-year-old proprietary driver from ATI/AMD, but that is with the classic Mesa DRI driver. To yesterday's results we have now added in our results from ATI's Gallium3D (R300g) driver using a Mesa 7.9-devel Git snapshot from yesterday to see how this runs against the older Catalyst drivers.

We are in the process of conducting a set of tests looking at how the performance of Ubuntu Linux has evolved through their Long-Term Support (LTS) releases beginning with their first 6.06 "Dapper Drake" version followed by Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron", and then the Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" release that will be released by month's end. These benchmarks will look at how the performance of Ubuntu Linux has changed over the past four years, but first we deviated from our original plans to get a look at how the current open-source ATI R500 graphics driver in Ubuntu 10.04 provided by the Mesa stack performs against older proprietary ATI Catalyst drivers.

While we are just weeks away from delivering the most comprehensive Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks , and Apple is on the heels of releasing the major Mac OS X 10.6.3 update, for those impatient ones today we have published an extensive set of tests comparing the performance of Mac OS X 10.6.2 against a development build of Ubuntu 10.04. This is our first time exploring how Canonical's Lucid Lynx can compete with Apple's Snow Leopard.

Over the past two weeks, we have published a variety of articles looking at different aspects of the open-source Linux graphics stack. These articles range from comparing the Gallium3D and classic Mesa performance to comparing the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting performance. Today we are continuing with this interesting Linux graphics coverage by publishing benchmarks comparing the performance of the Radeon Mesa DRI graphics driver to AMD's Catalyst 10.4 proprietary driver. Is the open-source driver finally catching up to AMD's highly optimized driver? Continue reading to find out.

NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property. However, NVIDIA has decided to deprecate this open-source driver of theirs. No, NVIDIA is not working on a new driver. No, NVIDIA is not going to support the Nouveau project. Instead, NVIDIA now just recommends its users use the X.Org VESA driver to get to NVIDIA.com when installing Linux so they can install their proprietary driver.

Our friends over at Unigine Corp love to push the bounds of graphics realism in their Unigine Engine, which continues to be one of the most advanced commercial game engines, and right now is certainly the most advanced game engine for Linux. While there are not many game studios actually shipping products based on Unigine's technology right now, Unigine Corp is known for producing a couple technology demos and working with us on the Phoronix Test Suite. Their Unigine Sanctuary benchmark was phenomenal, their Unigine Tropics benchmark was even better yet and set a new Linux OpenGL precedent, and now Unigine Heaven takes it unbelievably further.

Last week we featured a review on two MSI WindBox Atom 330 NetTops that we had purchased to add to our testing farm, which as you may now know went into our Phoromatic Ubuntu Tracker setup that is monitoring the performance of the latest Ubuntu development packages on a daily basis. Before devoting this hardware to the farm, we ran a few benchmarks comparing the performance of NVIDIA's ION GeForce 9400M graphics processor to the ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor found on the MSI 6667BB-004US and several other Atom-powered devices.

Phoromatic, our remote test management system that makes it incredibly simple to deploy the Phoronix Test Suite across an array of systems within an organization or around the world, has been in development for more than a year. We publicly announced this unique enterprise solution when developing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and it publicly went into beta with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 where it became possible to easily build a benchmarking test farm using our Phoronix software. Before ending out the year we launched Phoromatic Tracker with an initial reference implementation to monitor the Linux kernel performance on a daily basis and in a fully automated manner. Phoromatic has been a huge success, but today we are announcing that Phoromatic has reached a 1.0 status and additionally we are providing the Ubuntu Linux community with a new performance tracker in collaboration with Canonical.

The release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" is quickly approaching next month and it will arrive with a whole set of new features and improvements including a faster boot process, a long-awaited new theme, the Nouveau driver to replace the crippled xf86-video-nv driver, the unveiling of the Ubuntu One Music Store, integration of Plymouth, Ubuntu ARM advancements, and many other advancements for this Linux distribution. While it may not be as exciting as looking at these new end-user features, in this article we are testing out the available kernels for Ubuntu 10.04. Besides the standard Linux 2.6.32 kernel used in the Lucid release, there is also a specialized server kernel as well as a new -preempt kernel is now available. We are looking at how these different kernels perform and how they compare to the mainline Linux kernels with the 2.6.32, 2.6.33, and 2.6.34-rc1 releases.

There is no shortage of EXT4 benchmarks from comparing this evolutionary file-system's performance on netbooks to how it battles the Btrfs file-system to its performance recession. We have even benchmarked it on USB flash drives and on high-end SSDs. We have also delivered numerous Btrfs benchmarks. In this article though we are finally delivering something that has long been requested and that is Reiser4 file-system benchmarks running directly against EXT4 and Btrfs. We have also thrown in the original ReiserFS file-system for comparison too.

After releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 earlier this month and delivering the subsequent 2.4.1 update, we have now released PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 "Anzhofen" to the public. PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 makes it extremely easy to benchmark your computer on a completely standardized software stack from a Live DVD/USB environment.

In December we wrote that Ubuntu 10.04 already shortened the boot time, which has been a great focus amongst Canonical and Ubuntu developers as they strive for a ten second boot. A lot has changed since that article was published last year, including the introduction of Plymouth and many kernel mode-setting improvements along with the introduction of Nouveau for NVIDIA KMS support. We've ran a new boot performance comparison on two laptops and a netbook as we see how the boot times are looking with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS when compared to Ubuntu 9.10. We have also looked at how the power consumption has changed in the Lucid Lynx for these mobile devices.

We have tested a few interesting Intel Atom-powered nettop computers lately from the ASRock ION 330HT-BD that bears a Blu-ray drive and an Intel Atom 330 CPU with NVIDIA ION graphics to the ASUS Eee Top that packaged the entire system within a touch-screen monitor. In this article we are trying out the CompuLab Fit-PC2, which is definitely the smallest Atom-powered computer we have tested to date. The Fit-PC2 easily fits in the palm of your hand and it packs an Intel Atom Z530 processor with a Poulsbo graphics processor, a 160GB SATA HDD, and 1GB of system memory.

This weekend at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, Matthew Tippett and I presented a talk entitled Five Stages of Benchmark Loss: PTS and You. In this hour-long talk, we covered Linux benchmarking, what has been learned over the years of benchmarking at Phoronix, the Phoronix Test Suite, and the five stages that users and developers generally go through when they lose out on benchmarking results. For those that were unable to attend this event, here are the slides and recordings.

Last month we published benchmarks of EXT4 comparing this file-system's performance when it was first marked stable in the mainline kernel and then where it is at now in the Linux kernel while testing every major release in between. This article was followed up by a Btrfs versus EXT4 comparison using the Linux 2.6.33 kernel to see how the two most talked about Linux file-systems are battling it out with the latest kernel. After those Linux file-system benchmarks were published, we received a request from Canonical to look at the EXT3 performance too. With that said, we have done just that and have published EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs benchmarks from Ubuntu 9.10 and a Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot from an Intel Atom netbook.

In conjunction with the launch of the Core i3/i5 Clarkdale processors last month, Intel introduced the H55 and H57 Chipsets. The Intel H55 Express Chipset is designed for use with these new processors and Core i7 800 series CPUs. The H55 is compatible with the HD graphics found embedded onto the new Clarkdale CPUs as well as the PCI Express 2.0 slots and dual channel DDR3 memory controller provided by the CPU itself, while the chipset itself provides support for the digital displays, HD audio, six PCI Express x1 slots, Serial ATA, Gigabit LAN, and Intel ME Firmware / BIOS support. As our first Linux review of an Intel H55 motherboard we are checking out the ECS Elitegroup H55H-M.

As we alluded to last week, we have been in the process of benchmarking many Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards using the open-source ATI Linux graphics stack with the Mesa R600/700 DRI driver. We have now carried out our first batch of R600/700 3D tests using this constantly evolving open-source driver to provide OpenGL acceleration and here are the results.

Last week we delivered our first Linux benchmarks of Intel's Core i3 Clarkdale processor with a variety of computational tests through the Phoronix Test Suite. While the Core i3 packs a nice performance punch, that is not all it has to offer. Also found on the Clarkdale (and mobile Arrandale) processors is an integrated 45nm graphics processor that is supposed to offer a decent level of performance in comparison to earlier Intel IGPs normally found on the motherboard's Chipset. In this article are these first Intel benchmarks for the Clarkdale graphics processor as we see how its open-source Intel driver stack compares to that of AMD with their open-source Radeon stack up through the Radeon R700 series.

Phoronix Media has announced the immediate release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 (codenamed "Lenvik"), as the latest update to their open-source testing framework that delivers immediate and measurable advantages to its customers. The Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 software is compatible with a greater number of operating systems, introduces support for mobile platforms, offers a new range of test profiles, and other features to further solidify its premiere position within the computer benchmarking industry.