Ubuntu 11.04: i686 vs. i686 PAE vs. x86_64

At the end of 2009 I published benchmarks comparing Ubuntu's 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit Linux kernels. Those tests were carried out to show the performance impact of using 32-bit with PAE (Physical Address Extension) support, which on the plus side allows up to 64GB of system memory to be addressable from 32-bit machines, but is still significantly slower than a 64-bit kernel and user-space. In this article the tests have been carried out on modern hardware and with the latest Ubuntu 11.04 packages to see how the three kernel variants are performing in 2011.

While nearly all desktop/notebook hardware shipping has been 64-bit capable for some time, Canonical continues pushing Ubuntu 32-bit as the "recommended" version of Ubuntu. 64-bit Linux itself and nearly all major open-source programs have been in great x86_64 shape for years, but Canonical is likely still recommending 32-bit Ubuntu for the few binary-only programs out there that work better in a 32-bit environment, namely Adobe Flash and the Java web plug-in. There are 64-bit plug-ins available, but they are not generally updated at the same pace as the 32-bit version, for example. There are also open-source alternatives such as Lightspark and Gnash that natively support i686, x86_64, and even other architectures too. So it is becoming somewhat odd that Canonical is still pushing 32-bit Ubuntu over the 64-bit version even when they still will not ship Adobe Flash and other binary blobs by default so that they can remain a free software distribution.

For this testing, the beta build of Ubuntu 11.04 was benchmarked with the 2.6.38-7-generic i686, 2.6.38-7-generic-pae i686, and Linux 2.6.38-7-generic x86_64 kernels from the Ubuntu Natty repository were benchmarked with the matching user-land of the architecture. Testing was done on two notebooks, a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 and a System76 Serval Professional.

The older Lenovo ThinkPad notebook has an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.50GHz dual-core), 4GB of system memory, 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 SATA HDD, and NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics.

The System76 Serval Professional is a new Sandy Bridge notebook from the Linux-friendly vendor with an Intel Core i7 2820QM (2.30GHz quad-core + Hyper Threading), 8GB of system memory, 80GB Intel SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M graphics.

Ubuntu 11.04 with its Unity 3.6.8 desktop, X.Org Server 1.10.0, NVIDIA 270.30 binary driver, GCC 4.5.2, and the EXT4 file-system were tested.

This testing was done via the Phoronix Test Suite with the Unigine Tropics, Lightsmark, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Apache, PostgreSQL, SQLite, OpenSSL, timed Apache compilation, timed PHP compilation, Bullet, LZMA, Parallel BZIP2, C-Ray, POV-Ray, Smallpt, FLAC, x264, Ogg, GraphicsMagick, John The Ripper, and TTSIOD Renderer test profiles.