On Old Hardware, Think Twice About Ubuntu 12.04

[Camelek]

Not only without PAE...

Processors without CMOV feature will go out of new Ubuntu too.
That feature is older than PAE, so if your processor lacks CMOV it probably lacks also PAE.

Here is what about CMOV thinks Linus:

http://ondioline.org/mail/cmov-a-bad-idea-on-out-of-order-cpus

[curaga]

So you are still seeing PNG at Phoronix but at least SVG on OB? (without any force_format URL appending) Okay, I think I know the problem if you can confirm this.

Yes, exactly that.

[Kivada]

I wonder if most of this regression is just caused by the Unity interface. It would be interesting to see benchmarks for 12.04 done on the classic Gnome Panel (which still exists)

Thats my guess, it's why I moved from Ubuntu Studio 11.10+XFCE to Mint 12+Mate on the old P4 2Ghz, It's Ubuntu, only better as It's Ubuntu pre Unity and Gnome3.

[Hamish Wilson]

In my experience it is mostly just desktop changes that cause problems. I am running a system currently with just 512 MB of RAM with the Fedora 15 LXDE spin and it is operating fine. Although, this laptop is not that old, but simply came with an insanely low amount of memory.

[tommo1982]

Now, this makes me think. I wanted to install 12.04 Xubuntu for it's long time support availability. Reading through the article made me wonder. I thought, newer is better. They fixed many things, added something nice ... but I didn't consider loss of performance to be an issue on my laptop. Now I am wondering whether my Intel P6200 with 2GB of RAM can pull off 12.04 even with Xfce. Maybe I should stay with 11.04, but download the 64bit version. I was hoping for 64bit 12.04 thought. Heard they are working on some fixes and stuff.

[x27lu]

I wonder if most of this regression is just caused by the Unity interface. It would be interesting to see benchmarks for 12.04 done on the classic Gnome Panel (which still exists)

[Chewi]

I installed 12.04 on an older machine (forgot the exact spec) with 1GB RAM for my in-laws. In retrospect, I should have chosen the 32-bit version over the 64-bit version. Switching to Unity 2D helped a lot but it's still a bit sluggish. Better than the bloated Windows setup they had before though.

[x27lu]

I wonder if most of this regression is just caused by the Unity interface. It would be interesting to see some 12.04 benchmarks when using the Gnome Panel (which still exists)

[Michael]

Michael, I don't think the lines are supposed to be black (text is still tiny too).

I get the svg at openbenchmarking (which merely has unreadable tiny text, but properly colored lines), but png here at phoronix?


On a more positive note, is that r300g getting twice the fps of the blob?

So you are still seeing PNG at Phoronix but at least SVG on OB? (without any force_format URL appending) Okay, I think I know the problem if you can confirm this.

[kobblestown]

64 bit works best on systems with 4GB or more of RAM so if you got less than that on a 64 bit system go with a 32 bit version

For Windows 7 I would agree that the threshold is 4GB. But for Linux, in my experience, it's around 2GB. This has been discussed quite a number of times on Phoronix forums. With 64-bit kernel and applications you get more general purpose registers and much better FPU - at least SSE2 by default versus the ancient x87 by default for 32-bit applications (yes, 32 bit applications can make use of SSE2 but they either have to have been built with it and then they won't run on any system that doesn't support SSE2 or discover and use it dynamically which only a handful of applications can do, mplayer being a notable example). With 32-bit setup you get slightly less memory consumption but in my opinion it is more than made up for by the advantages of 64 bit. And 32-bit mode has another drawback that is rarely mentioned - not all physical memory is mapped in the kernel part of the address space. Apparently, in the default 3G/1G memory split there's room for only 896MB physical memory mapped into the kernel address space at all times. The rest is HIGHMEM. If the kernel is to use it, it has to map it into its address space first. So there's constant juggling. I don't know how much of an issue that is but it certainly doesn't help.

There's also a case to be made that with tighter memory limits one can use 32-bit userland with a 64-bit kernel. But, at least to the best of my knowledge, this setup has never been tested by Michael. I, for one, would very much like to see such test.