With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking.

A few weeks back Con Kolivas returned to the Linux kernel scene after parting ways with kernel development for two years. Con, who has contributed a great deal to the Linux kernel in the past particularly with CPU schedulers, returned and introduced BFS.

Kernel developer Ingo Molnar has done a benchmark test to compare his Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) with the recently released BFS from Australian Con Kolivas.

If your laptop is running Linux you might not be happy with the battery life you are getting. There are numerous reasons for the possible extra drain on your battery.

The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.

With the release of Firefox 3.5 right around the corner and the inclusion of the new Tracemonkey javascript engine, I thought I'd do a quick javascript performance comparison between the Linux and Windows versions.

The same application performs differently on different platforms. Differences include compiler brand (Microsoft Visual C++ vs gcc), compiler version (gcc 3 and 4), operating system characteristics, and file systems. These OpenOffice.org 3.0 benchmarks measure vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org on 3.0 on Microsoft Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

When I write reviews of various Linux distributions and describe differences in performance I almost invariably get a comment to the effect that all Linux distros are essentially the same: running the same kernel, the same libraries, the same filesystems. Performance should be essentially the same, right?