Benchmarks Of Fedora 9 Through 11

Last week we delivered benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 and found for the most part that these two incredibly popular Linux distributions had performed about the same, except for a few areas where there notable differences. However, like in the past when we have looked at Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks or benchmarking the past five Linux kernels, we are now looking at the performance of Fedora over their past few releases. In this article we have a range of system benchmarks from Fedora 9, 10, 11, and the latest Rawhide packages as of this week.

The system we used for carrying out all of this testing was made up of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor, an ASRock ConRoe1333-DVI/H motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR2 memory, a 200GB Seagate ST3200826AS SATA HDD, and integrated Intel 945G graphics. The hardware was maintained the same throughout testing. When testing out each of the Fedora releases (except for Rawhide where we had upgraded on top of a Fedora 11 installation), we had performed a clean installation of the given Fedora release using the x86_64 DVD and used the default file-system layout that occupied the entire SATA HDD. When each Fedora release was installed, the system was left with its stock configuration/settings, which does include the use of SELinux, etc.

To recap some of the key packages in each release, Fedora 9 was based upon the Linux 2.6.25 kernel, used GNOME 2.22.1, shipped with the X Server 1.5.0 RC1, used the xf86-video-intel 2.2.1 DDX driver with Mesa 7.1, and used GCC 4.3.0 as its compiler. Fedora 10 had stepped up to the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, shipped with GNOME 2.24.1, provided X Server 1.5.3, on the graphics front had xf86-vieo-intel 2.5.0 with Mesa 7.3-devel, and had GCC 4.3.2 as its compiler. In Fedora 11 there is the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.7.0 with Mesa 7.5-devel, and GCC 4.4.0. Fedora 12 development is only getting started, but there were already hundreds of new packages in Rawhide. In our Rawhide test setup with the latest packages as of 2009-06-16 there was the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, GNOME 2.26.2, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.7.0 with Mesa 7.5-devel, and GCC 4.4.0. Fedora 9 and 10 used the EXT3 file-system by default while Fedora 11 and Rawhide use the newer EXT4 file-system.

With the latest 2.0 Sandtorg code for the Phoronix Test Suite we ran a number of different test profiles with each of the four Fedora releases. Testing out the open-source graphics stack in Fedora was Urban Terror, OpenArena, World of Padman, and GtkPerf. Covering the system side of things was Parallel BZIP2 Compression, Apache Benchmark, LAME MP3 Encoding, FFmpeg, C-Ray, POV-Ray, Timed HMMer Search, Threaded I/O Tester, PostMark, Dbench, GraphicsMagick, OpenSSL, Crafty, dcraw, SQLite, and PostgreSQL.