Fedora 20 Yields Great Linux Performance On AMD's Kabini APU

The Linux benchmark / performance data to share this Saturday morning on Phoronix is of Fedora 20 on the AMD E1-2100 "Kabini" APU on the ECS KBN-I, an AMD + motherboard combination that during sale periods can be found for a little over $30 USD. We already found Kabini's Radeon HD 8210 graphics to perform well with the open-source driver and this article has more Linux OpenGL results along with stressing other subsystems. Tested was Fedora 20 with updates like the Linux 3.14 kernel and Mesa 10.

The Fedora 20 software configurations tested from this low-end dual-core AMD APU clocked at 1.0GHz were:

- Fedora 20 "out of the box" with the Linux 3.11 kernel and Mesa 9.2.3.

- Fedora 20 with all available stable updates at the time of testing, which bumped the key software versions to Mesa 9.2.5 and the Linux 3.13.5 kernel.

- The updated Fedora 20 stack and then installing the Linux 3.14-rc5 kernel from the Rawhide Nodebug kernel repository.

- The updated Fedora 20 stack including the Linux 3.14 kernel and then enabling the Mesa 10.1 Fedora 20 repository. Originally, this repository just had Mesa 10.0 due to GNOME Shell issues with the Mesa 10.1 packages at the time, but in the end Mesa 10.1-rc3 can currently be found in this user-made Fedora 20 Copr repository and it worked just fine with the GNOME Shell 3.10.4 release.

The AMD E1-2100 APU + ECS KBN-I hardware and Radeon HD 8210 graphics were kept the same during testing. The system was running with a 32GB OCZ Core solid-state drive and 4GB of system RAM.

All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite for test automation and guaranteed reproducibility.