Chromium OS, Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Remix Benchmarks

When looking at the 1080p (to better stress the system even though the panel is only 1024 x 600) H.264 video playback we used the X-Video support, which handles some of the video processing on the Intel IGP but is not nearly as much as there would be if the Intel 945 IGP and Linux driver supported VA-API or VDPAU. This graph from the Phoronix Test Suite plots the CPU usage every second as the sample video file is played back three times. From looking at these results from the five Linux distributions tested, the CPU usages were very close to each other except for a few spiking in different areas. When looking at the average CPU usage, the lowest was Fedora 12 at 52.1%, but all of them were very close to one another. The highest CPU usage was Moblin 2.1 at 57.3%, or about 5% higher than Fedora 12. Chromium OS had an average CPU usage of 52.9%, which put it in third place after Fedora 12 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10.

OpenArena had not run with Chromium OS due to its limited X stack, but for the four other distributions, the frame-rates were very close.

When looking at the time to compress a 256MB file using LZMA compression, the fastest distribution at this task was Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 followed closely by openSUSE 11.2, Chromium OS, Fedora 12, and then in last was Moblin 2.1. Moblin 2.1 ended up being much weaker in this test than the other tested distributions.