Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ARMv7 Linux Performance Gains

Earlier in the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" development cycle I noted some performance improvements happening on the ARM side, particularly for Texas Instruments OMAP4. Namely, Ubuntu 12.04 was ARMing up for better performance with ARM hard-float support and the performance becoming more compelling for the PandaBoard ES hardware with proper cpufreq support. In this article is a comparison of the Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 ARM performance.

The benchmarks in this article are being done from a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 PandaBoard ES development board with 1GB of RAM and a 16GB SDHC card. The TI OMAP4 Ubuntu images were used each time and each Ubuntu installation was left in its stock configuration each time.

A bulk of the ARM performance improvements in Ubuntu 12.04 come down to the proper OMAP4460 CPU support and the ARM hardfp support by default, but overall Canonical continues to ramp up their ARM Linux support efforts, so let's have a look.