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Recently via email we were asked to run a comparison of the different anti-aliasing and image rendering options between the ATI/AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers and hardware. Well, we have now run a few quantitative and qualitative tests at different anti-aliasing levels under Linux. For those that want to run the tests themselves with their own drivers and hardware, we also have provided instructions on how you can easily do so using the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" development build -- it is irresistibly easy.

Tomorrow will mark the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, and while there is still a long journey ahead for this Long-Term Support release before it officially makes its debut in April, we could not pass up the opportunity to provide some early benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has already pulled in X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 and other updated graphics packages along with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel that it will be using in the final build, which already presents some core differences from the current stable release, Ubuntu 9.10.

For the month of November we ran the 2009 Linux Graphics Survey, which is a survey in regards to X.Org and the Linux graphics stack that we have been hosting annually for the past three years. This year there was 13,836 results submitted and we have now had the time to go over these results and are publishing all of the numbers today.

This year with the Phoronix Test Suite we have delivered four major updates to this leading, widely adopted, multi-platform testing software that has brought dozens of new test profiles and literally hundreds of significant changes. These changes ranged from features to autonomously track performance regressions within any code-base, the ability to not only compare frame-rates within OpenGL tests but image quality comparisons too, support for mobile platforms, and so much other major work to further drive automated testing and benchmarking not only on Linux but OpenSolaris, *BSD, and Mac OS X too. In 2009 we also launched PTS Desktop Live, our own operating system for carrying out standardized benchmarks in an easy-to-use and repeatable manner from a live Linux environment, and also Phoromatic, which is designed for the enterprise world and allows the Phoronix Test Suite to be easily deployed across many systems and then managed from a central interface. The year is not over yet, nor is our work on ensuring that the Phoronix Test Suite is the most powerful and robust testing/benchmarking platform. With that said, as of this morning our Phoronix kernel test farm is now alive!

With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.

Intel released Moblin 2.1 earlier this month, Canonical released Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 late last month, and various other vendors have offered up their fall distribution refreshes too. Oh yeah, and Google just released the Chromium OS source code a few days ago! With all of the netbook-focused distribution updates, we found it time to run an onslaught of new benchmarks, comparing some of the leaders in this field along with running a couple full-blown desktop distributions for this round of Linux netbook benchmarking. Here are our benchmarks, including the world's first look at the Chromium OS (Chrome OS) system performance from the latest development build. Covered is everything from the video playback performance to encoding to battery power consumption and CPU/memory usage tests.

Intel's Linux graphics driver stack is often at the forefront of X.Org / Mesa innovations, from Intel being the first driver having in-kernel video memory management to being the first driver with mainline kernel mode-setting support to even being the driver that often first receives support for new OpenGL extensions in Mesa. The Intel Linux driver stack can be attributed with many firsts, but continually pushing this driver while putting out quarterly timed releases has led to some pains. Earlier this year in fact the driver stack was rather buggy -- especially in Ubuntu 9.04 -- that impaired many users with stability issues, performance problems, and other headaches. Most of the regressions from overhauling the Linux driver stack have been resolved, but where is the driver stack at now? The Intel stack in Ubuntu 9.10 is performing rather well, but where it's more important is its status within Fedora as more of the bleeding-edge graphics packages are pulled into this release that often don't make it into other distributions until months later when they roll out their next releases. To see where the Intel Linux graphics are at in Fedora 12, we ran the same set of benchmarks in the Fedora 10, 11, and 12 releases with an Intel G43 IGP.

Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2. As we await the release of FreeBSD 8.0 to deliver a larger operating system comparison, we have carried out a fresh round of tests comparing Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 (both x86 and x86_64 editions) under a variety of tests.

Back in June Enlightenment E16 reached version 1.0.0 and then a few weeks later there was an E17 development snapshot released, but there hasn't been a whole lot of news out of the Enlightenment camp over the past year. In fact, most new Linux users have likely never even heard of the Enlightenment. For the uninformed, Enlightenment is a window manager that has been around since 1997 but doesn't receive too much mainstream love. Fortunately though it now has the backing of a major electronics manufacturer who is also sponsoring its development.

Yesterday marked the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 and it was the best version yet with the addition of many new exciting and useful features. While this release was gratifying, there are much greater plans for the Phoronix Test Suite going into the next decade. It has already been shared that Windows support is coming, but there are other huge features coming too as soon as Q1'2010. Up to this point, most of the tests and the design of pts-core (the Phoronix Test Suite engine) have been focused on quantitative benchmarks with many of the tests spitting out a frame-rate, time, or some other measurement. However, now being supported in the Phoronix Test Suite is the ability to produce abstract results, such as screenshots used for image quality comparisons. The Phoronix Test Suite can now track the image quality of various test profiles (such as OpenGL games) across hardware configurations, drivers, and more.

Last Friday during the Gallium3D workshop we learned that the Tungsten Graphics developers that were bought out by VMware have been working on a virtual Gallium3D driver that would be used by guest operating systems running within VMware's virtualization platform. This is especially interesting considering that it will allow virtualized guests to have accelerated access to X11, OpenGL, OpenCL, X-Video, XvMC, and all sorts of other possibilities that's just limited by what's supported by the available state trackers.

Continuing in the tradition of providing feature-rich, quarterly updates to the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix Media has announced the immediate availability of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 (codenamed "Bardu"). Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 continues to expand the capabilities and feature set for this open-source testing framework with the introduction of many new features, a new graphical user-interface, numerous new test profiles and suites, and a public beta of the Phoromatic remote test management system.

It was almost exactly one year ago that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, but now their motives behind that acquisition are becoming more clear. Being hosted at VMware's headquarters today in Palo Alto, California was a Gallium3D Workshop, where various open-source Mesa developers are currently at and others connecting remotely. At this workshop it has just been announced that a "virtual" GPU driver for Tungsten's Gallium3D driver architecture will soon be publicly released. This Gallium3D driver that will be able to run within VMware guests should be quite interesting, since thanks to the design of Gallium3D, will be able to leverage the existing state trackers.

In past articles we have delivered plenty of file-system benchmarks from testing out EXT4 to Btrfs to NILFS2. We have also delivered benchmarks from traditional hard drives to solid-state drives. One area though where we have not published any file-system benchmarks is for USB flash drives. Most users end up staying with the default FAT32 file-system for flash drives, but are there any performance advantages to using EXT3, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, or ReiserFS? We have the benchmarks today to share atop the latest Linux 2.6.32 kernel build.

In the United States, the end of Autumn is nearing and Winter is approaching, but there hasn't yet been any push to get Reiser4 into the mainline Linux kernel. What has happened? Well, we asked Shishkin. Before asking Linus to pull Reiser4 into the mainline Linux kernel, he first wants to publish a plug-in design document in a scholarly magazine in order to facilitate some independent expert review. After missing the deadline for FAST 2010, Shishkin is now hoping to publish this Reiser4 document for USENIX Annual 2010. This would be due in January, but their annual conference does not take place until June. After that, they can focus on finally getting this advanced Linux file-system into the mainline code-base.

Back in August we reviewed the OCZ Agility SATA 2.0 SSD, which we found to be a reputable solid-state drive that offered nice performance under Linux . However, a step up from the Agility series is the Agility EX line. The OCZ Agility EX is designed to offer maximum performance with its SLC NAND-based storage and Indilinx controller. How though does the performance of this $400 SSD for just 60GB of storage compare to their other MLC-based SSDs under Linux? We have the benchmarks .

Canonical released Ubuntu 9.10 last week, which introduced the Ubuntu Software Center and brought a wide variety of other improvements, while Red Hat is scheduled to release Fedora 12 in two weeks. With the impending release and the current development freeze, we took the compose release candidate for Fedora 12 x86_64 and have looked at how its performance compares to Ubuntu 9.10. In this article are our results, which actually show some rather large differences between Fedora and Ubuntu when it comes to the speed of the Linux desktop.

There's the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix Global, and PTS Desktop Live as our family of free software products to provide extensive benchmarking and automated testing capabilities atop Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD, and Mac OS X operating systems. The Phoronix Test Suite has more than 120 test profiles and 50 test suites with new suites and tests continuing to come in through its extensible architecture, but for organizations with multiple test systems or entire testing farm(s) devoted to performance monitoring and regression tracking, they have had to strap the Phoronix Test Suite atop their own management systems or hack away at simple scripts to deploy our testing software across an array of systems. Today though we are announcing the public beta launch of Phoromatic. Phoromatic is a remote test management system that allows controlling any number of PTS-powered systems through a single web-based interface, which also allows all of the test results to be viewed from a central source.

Back in July of 2008 we learned of GNOME 3.0 as plans were laid out during the GUADEC '08 conference to make the GNOME 2.30 release their "3.0" version. A art and user-interface followed months later and then this April the GNOME 3.0 road-map was laid out that put this release, which will overhaul the GNOME desktop in comparison to the usual incremental releases, to come in March of 2010. The March target is just six months after the release of GNOME 2.28 and consistent with their bi-monthly release cycle they have been following for years. However, it looks like GNOME 3.0 may not hit in H1'2010 but rather September of next year.

For a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players. Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be thinking...