Ubuntu 64-bit More Competitive Against Mac OS X

[kraftman]

Or switch kernels as these kernel benchmarks would suggest. My brain suffered a regression and forgot about kernel used despite the fact even being mentioned in the article as the likely culprit for Linux's lower marks.

I pointed this out few posts before. Don't take everything as it is. Look at those Linux kernel benchmarks and read one of the Kano posts, so you should know what I mean

As others have mentioned we can probably throw out the graphics performance (again because of regressions) and just say we haven't seen a "real" test yet. What would a "real" graphics test for Linux be anyway? An evil blob contest?

In this case I prefer to see Intel open source drivers, but if you use blobs Linux probably won't loose here. Don't be so smart if you're talking about regressions, because there's a lot of them on other OS'es. It seems you never used nvidia blobs master, so you wouldn't say "again, because of regression" with such spite. The same about many other binary blobs.

[L4Linux]

You can play simple games even with these crappy intel drivers, both 2D and 3D. Urban Terror at 1280x1024 isn't that simple.

If you compare it to Crysis or Fallout 3, it is simple...
Its quake3 based engine is certainly not state of the art.

[deanjo]

As others have mentioned we can probably throw out the graphics performance (again because of regressions) and just say we haven't seen a "real" test yet. What would a "real" graphics test for Linux be anyway? An evil blob contest?

Yes, I chuckle at that too. "If you would use the uncrippled closed source solution instead if the native solution....."

[Jimmy]

There isn't any gap in SQLite. If you switch to Ext 4 you should see a huge improvement in this test.

Or switch kernels as these kernel benchmarks would suggest. My brain suffered a regression and forgot about kernel used despite the fact even being mentioned in the article as the likely culprit for Linux's lower marks.

As others have mentioned we can probably throw out the graphics performance (again because of regressions) and just say we haven't seen a "real" test yet. What would a "real" graphics test for Linux be anyway? An evil blob contest?

[Apopas]

Maybe more powerful Intel graphic accelerators like GMA X3000 or GMA X4500 are up to the task for quite a few games, provided that a good driver is in use.
You're right about using ATI or Nvidia for a game station, but shouldn't we be able to play a simple game in a laptop?

You can play simple games even with these crappy intel drivers, both 2D and 3D. Urban Terror at 1280x1024 isn't that simple.

[Apopas]

Just as Linux is slowly migrating to ext4 and Btrfs, OS X is slowly migrating to ZFS. As for "only knowing that the new linux kernel will be better than the last one", well the major SQLite regression made that not true for 2-3 kernels.

Well I should be more specific, I was refering to the very next kernel 2.6.30 which solves that problem, not in general.

Your also ignoring the fact that benchmarks provide an extremely specific example of what makes one OS better than another. Gentoo might be slightly faster than Ubuntu in respect to how quickly it runs, but thats a moot point if the extra time spent maintaining, emerging and compiling on a Gentoo system outweighs the speedup it provides. Things like ease of use, maintainability, software support, and security should be more important to choosing a system than how quickly it compiles a program (a feature only used by programmers).

Well i installed Gentoo 4 years ago and I needed almost a week to setup it. Too much time. But I have it all these years up to date, without more problems than the other distros and without the need to install the new version every 6 months or so on and the compilation takes place when I'm asleep or away. And about security, well Gentoo isn't infamous for that. Also easy of use is something I really don't care, I don't use gui tools in general. That's the good with linux, you choose what is better for you rather than have someone other who chooses what is better for everyone.
But that's a totally different thing
If we want to compare systems and OSes we could begin a conversation and don't finish until the day kernel 9.5.8.6 is out. Here we have benchmarks a nd benchmarks show numbers which are bigger or lower than other numbers. And the benchmarks till now show that Linux is faster than anything else.

[deanjo]

Last June at WWDC 08 it was said 10.6 would be shipping in about a year. WWDC 09 is a year later, is Apple's developer centric conference (most the sessions/labs for the devs will be on iPhone OS 3.0 and 10.6), and it is now Apples only major conference, why would it not come out then? Maybe a better question would be: what is a better time for it to come out?

http://blogs.computerworld.com/wwdc_snow_leopard_iphone_apple_steve_jobs

Also I still have my contacts @ apple and they confirm the same with reguard to 10.6 and WWDC. Think more a back to school or holiday release. It's not hardly the first time Apple has pushed back the release of a OS, 10.5 was pushed back a few times as well.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/05/13wwdc.html

At WWDC, we will be giving our developers a final Developer Preview release so they can see the incredible progress we’ve made on Snow Leopard and work with us as we move toward its final release.”

I don't see 32 bit and 64 bit support being dependent on the processor as an issue.

If the processor doesn't support 64-bit you cannot (without emulation anyways) run a 64-bit os on it. Not all the first Mac intels had EMT64 capabilites.

[Kano]

Well the ext4 code in U kernels is usually pretty recent. It is definitely not standard 2.6.28 code.

[kraftman]

Michael and Deanjo were right. There's regression or bug in Ext 3 in kernels before 2.6.30-x (maybe 2.6.29 is not affected...) which causes such big slow down in SQLite and probably in overall performance. I replaced generic kernel in Ubuntu 9.04 to the newest one and I have similar results in SQLite benchmark as with Ext 4. I apoligize for being such stubborn

P.S. there's a thread somewhere at lkml about this issue.

Here's something interesting:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/5/18/315

@Slyn

Just as Linux is slowly migrating to ext4 and Btrfs, OS X is slowly migrating to ZFS. As for "only knowing that the new linux kernel will be better than the last one", well the major SQLite regression made that not true for 2-3 kernels.

If you look at *BSD and Solaris benchmarks here, at Phoronix their results are even worse then Linux using Ext 3. It's little strange. However, in real world benchmarks they're still much faster then OS X. And if kernel is crap FS wouldn't help too much.

[L4Linux]

Yup but you aren't going afterall to buy a mac-mini or an Intel VGA for a game station. Even the 16 FPS of MacOSX make the game unplayable. The only option is ATI or NVIDIA VGA and there Linux goes very well.

Maybe more powerful Intel graphic accelerators like GMA X3000 or GMA X4500 are up to the task for quite a few games, provided that a good driver is in use.
You're right about using ATI or Nvidia for a game station, but shouldn't we be able to play a simple game in a laptop?