Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

[kraftman]

Anyway, I've had Windows machines running for months on end (and even then I restarted for updates) without ever failing. That's a whole lot more than I can say about Linux distros where X fails constantly. And everytime I update something I have huge problems with drivers (one driver needs one update, the other doesn't work with it and I need to downgrade again - if I'm lucky and I can find a driver at all).

Oh, what distro? There are Linux machines that run for years. I didn't had a single X crash since years, but I had a BSOD when I was refreshing Add/Remove programs. It seems it was too demanding task.

[kraftman]

Stupid edit window.

@Love4Boobies

I've got the feeling you're using binary blobs in your Linux.

[korpenkraxar]

Both interesting observations. I can't speak much for the situation in Windows since I only use it to play one game (XP). The few times I touch a Vista laptop from some friend I find it lagging with lots of disk I/O. What I can tell for sure is that Linux doesn't behave ideally either. Be it Firefox touching its database or some other program doing something, the whole system is not responsive for as long as the read/writes last. It would be excellent if that commit fixed this issue.

Yeah. No current mainstream OS is good in terms of I/O these days and Firefox is good example of a bad app. I am really looking forward to improvements in this area.

[LinuxID10T]

I agree the Cygwin thing is a good catch. IOZone sucks as a benchmark anyway, I'd much prefer a more realistic test. Still, the FS comparison was only a portion of the benchmarks here, and I don't think anyone should be very surprised to see NTFS slower than EXT4.

Well, EXT4 is only like 10 years newer...

[LinuxID10T]

Well, EXT4 is only like 10 years newer...

Actually... I correct myself... 13 years between NTFS and EXT4 unstable, and 15 years between NTFS and EXT4 stable. So that makes NTFS 17 years old. OUCH! Too bad that WinFS never made it out.

[LinuxID10T]

The thing about WinFS, it is really just a layer over NTFS, so, MORE OUCH!!!

[NomadDemon]

ntfs have many versions, vista have new ntfs, xp have old ntfs, nt have ultraold ntfs

[Agdr]

This benchmark seems to be have been done wrong: obviously on userspace CPU-only tasks there cannot be any significant difference.

Thus, the OpenSSL results are almost surely wrong, probably because it was compiled differently, it used a different amount of threads or did not trigger turbo boost if single-threaded.

No detailed description of the work done seems available, by the way, and the benchmark suite seems way too small.

Also a laptop might not be the best choice of hardware.

[deanjo]

Actually... I correct myself... 13 years between NTFS and EXT4 unstable, and 15 years between NTFS and EXT4 stable. So that makes NTFS 17 years old. OUCH! Too bad that WinFS never made it out.

If your not going to include the various versions of NTFS in your time line then you would have to treat all the ext file systems the same way. ext debuted in 1992 so that would make it 18 years old.

[rinthos]

Lets see the same comparison with ATI/AMD please. It would be rather helpful for those looking for a multi-OS workstation solution to compare ATI to NVIDIA in this space for equivilent/competing models.