Linaro 12.08 ARM OMAP4 Performance

The Linaro organization offers monthly builds of Android and Ubuntu for their member SoC vendors, but are these Linaro-optimized Ubuntu builds any faster than the normal Ubuntu for ARM images? Here are some benchmarks of Linaro 12.08 compared to recent upstream Ubuntu Linux releases.

The Ubuntu build of Linaro 12.08 is using the Linux 3.4.0-2-linaro-lt-omap kernel for the OMAP4 image as used by the PandaBoard ES. Linaro 12.08 defaults to the Unity 2D 5.15 desktop, X.Org Server 1.11.3, Mesa 8.0.2, and uses the GCC 4.6 tool-chain. Linaro 12.08 is effectively based upon Ubuntu 12.04 LTS but with a newer kernel and other optimizations.

Linaro 12.08 is officially available for the Origen, PandaBoard, and Versatile Express hardware. Linaro currently produces Android builds as well for Origen, PandaBoard, Versatile Express, and the Snowball. For today's testing, a PandaBoard ES with the Texas Instruments OMAP4460 was used for benchmarking.

From the same PandaBoard ES development board, Linaro 12.08 was compared to Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and an Ubuntu 12.10 development snapshot from 2012-08-21.