Fedora 13 Alpha Benchmarks

Following the release of Fedora 13 Alpha this week we delivered Intel graphics benchmarks looking at the performance of an Intel Atom Netbook using the very latest kernel, DRM, and Mesa packages that Fedora is known for carrying. There are regressions in the Intel stack worth noting, but in this article, we are continuing in our Fedora 13 benchmarking by looking at the general system performance of the Linux desktop.

We are using the same system from our Intel GPU benchmarking this week, which was a Samsung NC10 netbook. It's comprised of an Intel Atom N270, Intel GMA 950 graphics, 2GB of system memory, and a 32GB OCZ Core SSD. We tested out not only the Fedora 11, Fedora 12, and Fedora 13 Alpha releases, but we also compared these numbers against a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" from 2010-03-08.

Fedora 11 shipped with the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.7.0, Mesa 7.5, and GCC 4.4.1. Fedora 12 bumped these versions to the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, X Server 1.7.1, xf86-video-intel 2.9.1, Mesa 7.6, and GCC 4.4.3. Fedora 13 Alpha right now is running with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, X Server 1.8 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.10.0, Mesa 7.8-devel, and GCC 4.4.3. Ubuntu 10.04 is powered by the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X Server 1.7.5, xf86-video-intel 2.9.1, Mesa 7.7, and GCC 4.4.3. Both Fedora and Ubuntu use the EXT4 file-system by default.

We fired up the Phoronix Test Suite to run the LAME MP3 encoding, 7-Zip compression, LZMA compression, PostMark, Unpacking the Linux kernel, John The Ripper, GraphicsMagick, and the Bullet Physics Engine. As Fedora 13 still has a ways to go before its release and there are debugging options enabled within the alpha build as well as other development packages, its system performance now is not the same as it will be in May once it is officially released. With that said, we are publishing these graphs as-is for those interested in comparing Fedora 13 Alpha to the past releases or to Ubuntu 10.04.