Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 Benchmarks

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 was released last week and with all of its updated packages and changes compared to Ubuntu 9.04, we decided to carry out a fresh round of benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4. We used a Samsung NC10 for testing with an Intel Atom N270, 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 32GB OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, and Intel 945GME graphics.

The benchmarks we ran via the Phoronix Test Suite were OpenArena, Tremulous, LAME MP3 encoding, FFmpeg, 7-Zip compression, PostMark, SQLite, OpenSSL, GnuPG, John The Ripper, Stream, dcraw, PyBench, GtkPerf, and QGears2.

Ubuntu 9.04 uses the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.0, xf86-video-intel 2.6.3, Mesa 7.4, GCC 4.3.3, and an EXT3 file-system by default. Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 uses the Linux 2.6.31-rc5 kernel, GNOME 2.27.5, X Server 1.6.3, xf86-video-intel 2.8.0, Mesa 7.5, GCC 4.4.1, and an EXT4 file-system by default. Both distributions were left to their default settings and packages, which included the use of Compiz.

Starting with the OpenArena game, it ran about 7% faster under the latest Ubuntu development code compared to Ubuntu 9.04. This is thanks to improvements within Mesa and its GEM memory management, etc. The experience was also not like our earlier Intel Karmic encounters.

The ioquake3-powered Tremulous was about 5% faster with Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 over Ubuntu 9.04. We have more graphics tests later in this article.

Encoding an MP3 file using LAME was slightly faster with Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4.