Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, 12.04 On The NVIDIA Tegra 2

For those that were interested by the CompuLab Trim-Slice, a desktop built around the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, here are some more benchmarks. This time the numbers are looking at the performance of the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 system when using the Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, and 12.04 packages.

As mentioned in earlier articles, Ubuntu 11.04 is the operating system that ships by default on the CompuLab Trim-Slice, but the ARM system isn't locked down by any measures and users are free to install whatever operating system they wish. In this benchmarking of the Trim-Slice the user-spaces of Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, and the latest 12.04 development packages are being compared. The Linux kernel throughout this process remained using CompuLab's spin of the Linux 2.6.38, so this mostly comes down to comparing the compiler differences and other user-land changes between the last three release cycles of Ubuntu Linux.

Other benchmarks -- including a look at the Linux kernel changes and NVIDIA Tegra 2 graphics performance -- are still forthcoming. The Ubuntu ARM soft-float packages were used for all three releases. This ARMv7 benchmarking occurred in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite software.

There will also be more benchmarks upon the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, since right now there were a few desktop/graphics issues and other bugs.