Running Ubuntu 9.10 With Older PC Hardware

[V!NCENT]

Hardware back in the day: Same shit, more speed
Software back in the day: Same shit, less latency

Hardware today: reducing power consumption, more latency, more thorougput
Software today: more latency (causing performance drops on older hardware) and more thoroughput resulting in more speed on current hardware

People complaining back in the day: computers are still the same like they were 20 years ago. When are we going to see some advancements. Where is the future?
People complaining today: why are computers not like they were 10 years ago? I don't care about futuristic features! Scrap them! Why is my Windows7/Ubuntu 9.10 computer not faster than my Windows 3.1 pc was back in the day?
Conclusion: STFU

[kraftman]

WTF! That's an almost generalized huge performance drop!
What about the old refrain stating that Linux is so suited for older rig?

Last year I tried a Xubuntu 7.10 on a P3 500MHz laptop... ok quite old, but it was almost unusable (but I wrote my PhD thesis on it with win2000!!!!)

You've got to be kidding me. Kubuntu 8.04 ran great here on Duron 850 and 256MB Ram (much better then xp) and nvidia card which had wonderful QT3 acceleration! For old hardware use distros which are made for old hardware. However, you could suffer from increadibly slow 2D in some cases. It's still quite slow...

IMHO, I think that two areas are mainly responsible for that performance drop: modern graphic drivers (blobs) are getting more and more complicated and designed over newest hardware.. and the kernel itself (I have modern schedulers in mind).

You consider scheduler will raise system requirements to level you will notice this? This is bull. There are just scripts and daemons in Ubuntu which make it feel slower on older hardware. About those features it depends if you have them enabled or not. Karmic has many debbuging options and features enabled (like oops reporting, Perfcounters, AppArmor) which can make it much slower than it would be with such options disabled.

So.. is Linux getting more and more feature rich at the cost of getting heavier and heavier?

No, it depends what you have enabled.

Not directly related, but interesting:

2.6.30.6-Linux: 1.40MB 32 or 64bit I don't remember.

2.6.30.6-Linux-ARCH: 1.80MB - Arch Linux generic kernel 64bit

Win2000: 1.61MB 32bit
WinXP: 2.03MB 32bit
WinVista: 3.30MB 32bit

Anyone has different opinions or more clues to explain the results of the test?

I'm not sure, but it's probably enough to change file system options to have much different results. Some older Ubuntu could use writeback mode which is faster and some newer one ordered mode which is slower, but safer for data.

[kraftman]

People complaining today: why are computers not like they were 10 years ago? I don't care about futuristic features! Scrap them! Why is my Windows7/Ubuntu 9.10 computer not faster than my Windows 3.1 pc was back in the day?
Conclusion: STFU

This is the point, but you can setup the newest Linux kernel to run great on old hardware.

[Apopas]

I suppose debugging is on in this Karmic release, since is not the stable one, even if it's just one day before the actual release, right?

[kraftman]

I suppose debugging is on in this Karmic release, since is not the stable one, even if it's just one day before the actual release, right?

Yes, debugging is turned on in Karmic and they probably won't turn it off in the stable release.

[Apopas]

Yes, debugging is turned on in Karmic and they probably won't turn it off in the stable release.

Won't turn it off at all? How so?

[tormod]

I suppose debugging is on in this Karmic release, since is not the stable one, even if it's just one day before the actual release, right?

No, there is no debugging turned on. I guess you refer to compiling packages with debug flags, but this is not done during normal development. Packages are not rebuilt for the release, it ships with whatever the last build was.

[tormod]

The 3D game regressions on R300 could be caused by the radeon-rewrite in mesa. Bug link, especially for the Tremulous crash?

[kraftman]

No, there is no debugging turned on. I guess you refer to compiling packages with debug flags, but this is not done during normal development. Packages are not rebuilt for the release, it ships with whatever the last build was.

Have you looked at kernel config? Debugging is turned on.

[kraftman]

Won't turn it off at all? How so?

They provide some bug reporting tool - apport and maybe some debugging options must be turned on to make it working.