Fedora 18 Fails At ARM Wrestling Arch, Ubuntu, Linaro

Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

Fedora 18 for ARM is officially targeting Versatile Express (QEMU), the Tegra-based TrimSlice, the PandaBoard, GuruPlug, and BeagleBoard. With nearly every Linux ARM distribution targeting the OMAP4-based ARM Cortex-A9 PandaBoard, this is the reference board still used at Phoronix for evaluating the ARM Linux performance until more ARM Cortex-A15 hardware is supported. Plus we have a lot of PandaBoards and last year participated in a 96-core solar-powered ARM cluster.

The OMAP4/PandaBoard flavor of the Fedora 18 ARM Beta is using the Linux 3.6.10 kernel, GCC 4.7.2 20121109, and Xfce as its default desktop environment. The OMAP4460 ARMv7 benchmarking of the Fedora 18 Beta was compared to Fedora 17, Arch Linux, Ubuntu 12.10, and Linaro 12.12.