Chromium OS, Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Remix Benchmarks

The frequency monitor graph is a bit hard to read with all of the lines and bouncing back between 800MHz and 1600MHz, which are the two Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) states for the Intel Atom N270. The most important finding though from this run is that EIST is not functioning correctly with Chromium OS. During the idle/compress-7zip/ffmpeg testing, Chromium OS was running at just 1.60GHz and had never clocked down to 800MHz when it had the opportunity. With always running at the highest power/performance state, this may at least partially explain why Chromium OS was consuming the most battery power with the earlier results. However, openSUSE 11.2 was slightly less aggressive than the other three distributions with its CPU frequency changing, but it ended up consuming the least amount of power.

Our next system statistic was looking at the overall CPU usage. When it came to averages, Chromium OS had the highest at 66.3%, which was far greater than the ~51% and less averages for the rest. However, like our earlier tests, the Chromium OS average is only taking into account when that test was running, which did not include OpenArena. The 7zip compression test profile uses both logical CPU cores from Intel Hyper Threading and due to OpenArena not running with Chromium OS, it accounted for almost 50% of its CPU load average. When taking out the Chromium OS results, openSUSE 11.2 averaged the highest CPU usage at 51% while Moblin 2.1 was at 49%, Fedora 12 at 47%, and then Ubuntu Netbook Remix did the best at 44%. OpenSUSE having a much higher CPU average was a bit surprising considering that it has done the best power-wise of the five Linux distributions being looked at today. Optimizations in Ubuntu Netbook Remix seem to benefit it the best with having the most efficient / lowest CPU usage results.

Lastly, we looked at the memory usage during this testing. Chromium OS reported the lowest average, but again, it could not handle running OpenArena that chews up much more memory. Having the lowest memory footprint was Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 with an average of 542MB and then just peaking at 756MB while it consumed as little as 357MB of the 2GB of DDR2 system memory. Deviating a great deal from Ubuntu Netbook Remix / Moblin / Fedora was openSUSE, which started chewing up mass amounts of memory when OpenArena started. openSUSE 11.2 consumed as much as 991MB of system memory at a time while the second most memory-hungry distribution was Moblin 2.1, which peaked at 826MB (165MB less than openSUSE). It looks like openSUSE may have a memory leak occurring with its Intel Linux graphics driver stack or there is some issue going on with the KDE desktop when OpenArena is launched in full-screen. This should be something worth further investigation.