Chromium OS, Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Remix Benchmarks

[Kano]

The correct why would be:

a) Check in the initrd for Intel VGA, that's definitely trivial. If not there do:

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/Xorg

then X will start.

b) Use a bigger virtual filesystem, why not 3 gb? currently it is fixed to 2 gb with 131 mb free, even with more ram available it is impossible to use more.

[Kano]

@sofar

That's not correct. Vbox is even able to handle Compiz for Linux guest (with Xserver 1.5+). What i mean is what you see when you do

df -h

Then you will notice that no aufs overlay is used which is only restricted by tmpfs but some other way which relies on a creation time settings. Best is to compare that against Fedora.

Also i would like to know how to stop Moblin from tring to start X as user. That only works with Intel onboard. I don't know why it is so impossible hard to implement at least a working VESA fallback, it does not matter if you can not do fancy 3d stuff with it which i don't need anyway. Of course it would be nice to get vbox addons installed later in order to get mouse integration, screen resizing and if needed even 3d.

[mitcoes]

Thanks for this test, and of course as the Moblin depeloper says, some more tests may be added
boot times
- suspend/resume times
- total battery life while idle
- battery life while performing netbook-typical tasks, such as:
+ browsing webpages inclusing flash
+ perhaps watching youtube/hulu videos
+ skypeing

I think it is a good idea to add this tests to Phoronix test suite

[alec]

Yes, most glaring was that ext4 performed better than etx3

[Jimbo]

I think the review is totally unfair!!!!

All OS accept ext4 or ext3 FS, so, why not to run all test on the same filesystem, this way results are not filesystem dependant.

Yeah, i know that on some distributions you can't choose ext4 on installation process. But i think this is a feature not implemented yet, with a little work you can convert ext3 to ext4 and run the test.

[kersurk]

An interesting read. Though IMO all in all, every distro was quite the same.

[sofar]

@sofar

Tell me who is to blame for the extremely bad moblin performance with vbox?

long (technical) answer:

moblin is developed for netbooks, not for enthusiasts who want to run it inside a VM. Developing a netbook OS and making it run well in a VM as well is virtually impossible, since only virtualbox currently has OpenGL passthru, but it is completely dependent on the compatibility between the hosts' OpenGL capabilities, vbox's mapping to, and the client's requirements from the 3D hardware. Since moblin's UI requires hardware accelerated OpenGL (you can't make a decent UI nowadays without 3D and composite support...), it's pretty unlikely that you'll get anywhere near the native performance under any VM implementation, and vbox's OpenGL passthru isn't mature enough (or can't ever be...) to fix that hole.

People keep assuming that they can just test-drive every OS inside a VM and get 100% of the look/feel/performance of how it works on a real device, but in Moblin's case that is a totally wrong perception.

And why is the generated filesystem so extremely small, thats without any reason as it only restricts the size to install extra software

I'm not sure what you are referring to here, care to file a bugreport with numbers and debug output on bugzilla.moblin.org?

[data]

CPU usage allright with openSuse

I don't think it is too surprising that suse utilizes its cpu most. The target with battery and cpu-usage is - (sometimes) - to use the cpu as much as possible but less than 100%. So if you slow it down, the percentage will be higher, and you save energy while at it.

[Kano]

@sofar

Tell me who is to blame for the extremely bad moblin performance with vbox? And why is the generated filesystem so extremely small, thats without any reason as it only restricts the size to install extra software - it is not enough for vbox addons. With fedora it does work using:

http://kanotix.com/files/install-vbox-addons.sh

So why not in Moblin which is definitely a fedora clone. I know there are some extra depends needed to install, but without more space to install it is not that easy.

[StringCheesian]

I downloaded a VMware image of Chromium OS a couple of days ago, and ran it in VirtualBox. It boots very fast but the Chrome browser was the only app I could use, so I don't know how exactly you got to remount the root file-system. I got bored pretty quickly by it.

The videos about Chromium OS say they want to avoid the double initialization of hardware (the BIOS does it, then the kernel does all over again).

That's probably going to require something like coreboot. (Or maybe EFI... I don't know anything about EFI - maybe it can skip some of the stuff BIOS does?)

So even though the vmware image you tried boots fast, it probably still doesn't do justice to the boot speed that should result from what they're planning.