Sabayon 7 vs. Ubuntu 11.10 Performance

The release of Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" this week captured most of the Linux spotlight, but also arriving this week was Sabayon 7, the Gentoo-based Linux distribution that's meant to be easy-to-use and desktop-oriented. In this article Sabayon 7 has been pitted against Ubuntu 11.10 with its stock Linux 3.0 kernel and its new experimental Fusion kernel.

The benchmarking was done of a clean Sabayon 7 64-bit GNOME installation with its stock 3.0.0-sabayon kernel and then with the 3.0.0-fusion kernel, which offers up various experimental features not in the mainline kernel like the Brain Fuck Scheduler (BFS) and other kernel features. Ubuntu 11.10 was tested in its stock configuration with its Linux 3.0.0-12-generic 64-bit kernel. As Sabayon 7 ships with GCC 4.5 by default while Ubuntu 11.10 has the GCC 4.6 kernel, Ubuntu 11.10 was tested with both the GCC 4.5 and 4.6 compilers from the Oneiric repository. As Sabayon 7 utilizes the proprietary AMD Catalyst graphics driver by default, the Catalyst Linux driver was also enabled from the Oneiric repository.

A variety of graphics, computational, and disk benchmarks were carried out between Ubuntu and Sabayon using the Phoronix Test Suite.