Software Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 1,000 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for software. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

Immediately following the OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 27 benchmarks I expanded the scope of testing to look at how recent OpenJDK releases have been comparing to alternative JVMs like GraalVM, Temurin, and Semeru. Here are those benchmarks if curious about the Java performance in those different environments.

The coffee window is closing. Going back many years with the time it's taken to compile the Linux kernel has been a well known opportunity for a coffee break or even eating a meal during the lengthy Linux kernel build process. Even when the Linux kernel was much smaller than it is today, with the hardware at the time it would often be a very time consuming process... Thus incredible to think that we are now on the horizon of a ten second clean, default kernel build on Linux x86_64.

With the recent release of Java/OpenJDK 27 I began some fresh benchmarks in not having looked at the OpenJDK Java performance in a few years. Carried away, I ended up re-testing all the major OpenJDK versions going back to the venerable JDK 8.

With the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel showing some nice performance improvements over Linux 7.2 in different areas, Linux 7.2 also having brought some nice gains especially for I/O, and the preceding kernels also having seen some nice performance optimizations this year, I wanted to measure how far the Linux kernel performance has evolved so far in 2026. Today's article is looking at that with how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel at the end of 2025 to the current Linux 7.3 kernel.

Linux 7.1 brought some performance improvements for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", Linux 7.2 enhanced the performance for the integrated Arc B390 Xe3 graphics, and now for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel are various performance improvements at large. Today's article is looking at the performance of the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel compared to Linux 7.2 stable using the Core Ultra X9 388H within the Framework Laptop 13 Pro.

With Linux 7.3-rc1 out this week and marking the end of the merge window, it's onto a lot of Linux 7.3 performance testing at Phoronix and looking at all the new features of Linux 7.3. In today's article is a first look at the AMD EPYC Turin server performance on Linux 7.3-rc1 compared to Linux 7.2 stable with a few nice performance improvements to show.

With Linux 7.3-rc1 released to cap off the two week merge window, here is a look at the many exciting changes merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that is working its way toward release in the second half of October.

Earlier this week I showed off some of the very nice Btrfs performance gains on Linux 7.3. For those wondering what kernel optimizations may have carried over to other file-systems or other file-system specific enhancements, here are Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 Git performance benchmarks across Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on the same system.

With the Btrfs pull request for Linux 7.3 having delivered more performance optimizations with some ~3x and ~5x gains mentioned in specific areas, I was eager to test out the new Btrfs performance on the in-development kernel. In today's article are some benchmarks of Btrfs on Linux 7.2 stable compared to Linux 7.3 Git with some very enticing performance gains confirmed in various workloads.

Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as well as some regressions.

With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other hardware, and some nice I/O performance gains on AMD EPYC Turin. Today's kernel benchmarks are with the Intel Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS currently in the lab as part of the HP Z4 G6i workstation testing.

The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H across the Linux 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 kernels.

Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage.

Earlier this month I provided a look at the KDE Plasma 6.7 Wayland vs. X11 session performance for graphics/gaming on CachyOS using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics. Since then Phoronix readers -- including some premium supporters -- requested seeing some additional desktops tested with the latest CachyOS packages. So here we are now with seeing how KDE Plasma 6.7 compared to the Wayland-only GNOME Shell 50.3 desktop as well as the X11-based Xfce 4.20 desktop on CachyOS.

My testing of the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel continues in the lab. One of the latest promising findings from this kernel that will be released as stable in August is faster Intel Xe3 graphics performance on Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware.

Since May we have been benchmarking the SpacemiT K3 RISC-V SoC as one of the first to market RISC-V chips supporting the RVA23 profile. The SpacemiT K3 has shown how far RISC-V performance has come in the past half decade and one of the promising elements of this modern RISC-V SoC with its X100/A100 cores is supporting the RISC-V Vector Extension "RVV" 1.0. In this article are some initial benchmarks looking specifically at the RISC-V RVV 1.0 performance impact in different supported software.

Linux 7.2 is working toward release in August with its more than 43 million lines in the codebase. With Linux 7.2 there are many new changes in tow as summed up in today's feature overview.

I have begun testing out Linux 7.2 on more hardware following the winding down of the merge window and culminating with yesterday's Linux 7.2-rc1 release. Today's tests are looking at how Linux 7.2 in its early development state is comparing to Linux 7.1 stable on AMD Ryzen Threadripper.

Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the "experimental" flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version.

After recently noting the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage performance improving with Linux 7.1 and similarly finding performance gains for the Arc Pro B70 on Linux 7.1, several Phoronix readers have been wondering whether the newer Xe3 graphics with Panther Lake similarly benefit. Here are some CPU and iGPU benchmarks of the Core Ultra X7 358H "Panther Lake" SoC between Linux 7.0 and the recently stabilized Linux 7.1 kernel.

The long-in-development work on Cache Aware Scheduling looks like it will come to a head soon with it looking like Cache Aware Scheduling will land for Linux 7.2. Ahead of the upcoming merge window I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at different areas where this feature is shining.

The Linux 7.1 kernel performance has been looking quite good on the various Intel/AMD systems I have tested over the past three weeks. Linux 7.1 does bring some solid improvements over Linux 7.0 prior in different workloads and haven't encountered any worrisome regressions compared to the current Linux 7.0 stable kernel. For those wondering the longer-term picture, here are benchmarks of Linux 7.1 Git compared to recent Linux LTS kernel series going back to 2023 for providing a picture at how the upstream Linux kernel has netted 13% faster performance (geo mean) on the same hardware in less than three years.

GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM/Clang open-source compiler, which is the focus of today's benchmarking showdown.

The Linux 7.1 development kernel that amounts to nearly 40 million lines has a lot of new features and changes in tow. While Linux 7.1 stable won't be out until mid-June, here is a look at the interesting changes coming with this next stable version of the Linux kernel.

With the GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It's also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year.

With the Linux 7.1 merge window winding down ahead of the planned Linux 7.1-rc1 release on Sunday, I have begun testing out the Linux 7.1 Git state on various systems in my lab. So far Linux 7.1 appears to be looking good in the performance department with seeing a number of performance improvements in different areas but also a few possible regressions.

It has been a while since featuring a showdown of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers on Linux. With some fresh benchmarks being overdue plus the new JetStream 3 browser benchmark having been announced last week, here is some fresh data for how these two dominant web browsers are competing on the modern Linux desktop from an Intel Panther Lake system running Ubuntu 26.04.

In testing thus far on Ubuntu 26.04, the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop with the Wayland session is working pretty darn well and delivering a performance edge across many games/graphics workloads compared to the default GNOME 50 desktop. At least as far as AMD Radeon graphics are concerned, Plasma 6.6 is in quite impressive shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

With this week's release of Blender 5.1 I have begun benchmarking it on different CPUs and GPUs. In this article is an initial look at the positive impact Blender 5.1 is having on CPU-based rendering performance on Linux.

Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version.