Is Fedora 15 Faster Than Ubuntu 11.04?

Ending out May, we have an interesting set of tests comparing the performance of Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04. This is looking at the "out of the box" performance of both operating systems on three different systems. Not only is the actual test result looked at, but we also compared the power consumption of the two operating systems.

Three notebooks were used for testing:

HP EliteBook: Intel Core i5 2520M (Sandy Bridge), 160GB Intel SSD, 4GB DDR3 system memory, Intel HD 3000 SNB graphics.

ThinkPad T61: Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 SATA HDD, 4GB system memory, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics.

ThinkPad T60: Intel Core Duo T2400, 80GB Hitachi HTS541080 SATA HDD, 1GB system memory, ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics.

The EliteBook and T61 are x86_64 capable so we had used the 64-bit spins of Fedora and Ubuntu for that testing while the T60 was using the 32-bit build. In each configuration, we also used the stock open-source drivers (in the case of the T61 with NVIDIA graphics, the Nouveau Gallium3D had to be enabled using Jockey).

Key items to note between Fedora 15 "Lovelock" and Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" include:

Ubuntu 11.04: Linux 2.6.38, Unity 3.8.10 desktop, X.Org Server 1.10.1, xf86-video-ati 6.14.0, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.16, xf86-video-intel 2.14.0, Mesa 7.10.2, GCC 4.5.2, EXT4 file-system.

Fedora 15: Linux 2.6.38, GNOME Shell 3.0.1, X.Org Server 1.10.1, xf86-video-ati 6.14.99, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.16, xf86-video-intel 2.14.0, Mesa 7.11-devel, GCC 4.6.0, EXT4 file-system.

All testing was carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite and the results are reproducible using OpenBenchmarking.org.