Preview: Sandy Bridge Become Quicker With Linux 3.3, 3.4

With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that's largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.

Testing was done on 6 March from a Sandy-based HP EliteBook. A clean installation of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86_64 was done from its latest development snapshot at the time while dropped in were the Git versions of Mesa 8.1-devel and xf86-video-intel 2.18.0 from that date. The Linux 3.2, 3.3, and drm-next kernels were then compared while maintaining the rest of the system configuration. The Ubuntu mainline kernel package archive was used for simplicity and easy reproducibility.

Besides reading about the DRM changes coming for Linux 3.4, in this article you can read about the DRM work that has landed in the Linux 3.3 kernel, if you are not already up-to-date on your Phoronix reading.There's also other good changes to Linux 3.3.