NVIDIA L4T R16 Ubuntu 12.04 Performance

With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 "Cardhu" tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.

Up until recently, NVIDIA was promoting its soft floating-point binaries and the Linux sample file-system offered through their developer area was an Ubuntu 11.04 image being built for softfp. Fortunately, with the Release 16 series, it's all about hardfp and it's using the newer Ubuntu 12.04 LTS packages. From the Tegra 3 Cardhu tablet that NVIDIA sent over some time ago, I carried out a couple benchmarks comparing the new and old of Linux For Tegra.

The benchmarks this week of the ARM Cortex-A15 vs. Tegra 3 vs. Intel x86 were already using these latest L4T binaries and 12.04 file-system but these new benchmarks just provide some historical reference how the Tegra 3 performance on Linux has changed over the past year. Things will get really interesting though with Tegra 4 "Wayne" where they move from using quad-core Cortex-A9 to quad-core Cortex-A15.

The Linux kernel between the L4T releases is still based upon Linux 3.1, but there's been some updates applied to NVIDIA's packaged kernel since L4T R15. One of the nice parts about moving the sample file-system from Ubuntu 11.04 to 12.04 aside from defaulting to hardfp is that GCC 4.6.2 is used on 12.04 LTS where as GCC 4.5.2 was on Ubuntu 11.04.