MeeGo Netbook Performance: It's Beating Ubuntu & Co

Beginning with OpenArena, a game that uses the ioquake3 engine and is capable of running on Intel Atom netbooks, the results were interesting. While MeeGo 1.0 shares many common package versions with Fedora 13, the Intel-Nokia OS had the lowest frame-rate while Fedora 13 had the highest frame-rate. The difference was actually quite significant with MeeGo 1.0 coming in at 13 FPS while Fedora 13 averaged out to 20 FPS. Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 was in at 17 FPS and the older Moblin 2.1 release had 14 FPS. Fedora's open-source graphics stack is very up-to-date and does carry numerous patches that are not yet merged into the mainline code-bases of the X.Org Server / Mesa / DRM, which may partially explain this difference. However, likely a majority of the frame-rate differences between the different distributions comes down to the different window managers / compositing window managers being used by the different distributions. As our recent results from the KWin and Compiz tests show, there can be quite a performance penalty from using a compositing window manager with most graphics hardware / drivers.

When it came to PostMark, one of our common disk benchmarks, the fastest distribution turned out to be Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 LTS atop the EXT4 file-system. However, MeeGo 1.0 with its Btrfs file-system came in second and that put it slightly ahead of Fedora 13 and its EXT4 file-system and Moblin 2.1 with its EXT3 file-system.

With our test where it times how long it takes to unpack the linux-2.6.32.tar.bz2 package, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 again was the fastest. However, this time around, MeeGo 1.0 with Btrfs wound up being the slowest, but there were very slim margins between it and Fedora 13 / Moblin 2.1.