Gentoo Linux vs. Linaro ARM Benchmarks

The latest Linux ARM benchmarks at Phoronix are comparing the performance of Gentoo Linux against Linaro 12.08 from a 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 development board.

The ODROID-X was the quad-core ARM development platform being used for this cross-distribution benchmarking. For those that haven't seen the earlier Phoronix ODROID-X benchmarks, this small development platform has a Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.4GHz SoC, Mali 400 graphics, eight USB 2.0 ports, and 10/100 Ethernet. The ODROID-X comes out of Korea and retails for $129 USD, which is actually a lower price-point than the dual-core PandaBoard ES while packing quite a mighty performance punch with its four ARMv7 cores.

This article is using the ODROID-X throughout testing and puts the Ubuntu-based Linaro 12.08 against Gentoo Linux. Linaro 12.08 for ODROID-X was with the Linux 3.6.0-rc2 kernel, GCC 4.6, and an EXT4 file-system. The Gentoo Linux install to the quad-core board also was with the Linux 3.6.0-rc2 kernel but with the newer GCC 4.7.1 compiler and still with EXT4. The ODROID-X Gentoo Linux installation was setup by Robert Sanders, a Gentoo Linux developer. Robert setup Gentoo stable on the ODROID-X as he purchased the board to be used as the primary build host for Gentoo weekly ARM stages. After getting his ODROID-X setup with Gentoo, he was kind enough to let me SSH in to conduct some Gentoo ARM benchmarks using the Phoronix Test Suite. Thanks!