OpenSolaris 2009.06 Performance

Sun Microsystems released OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday as a key update to this Solaris desktop operating system used on both servers and desktops. The 2009.06 release introduced better codec support, SPARC support, improved hardware support, numerous enhancements to the Image Packaging System, and plenty of other changes we talked about in our article on Monday. Today though we are here with some benchmarks from this new OpenSolaris 2009.06 x86 release as we compare the performance to its predecessor, OpenSolaris 2008.11.

Our test system for OpenSolaris 2008.11/2009.06 benchmarking consisted of dual Intel Xeon E5320 Quad-Core processors, a Tyan Tempest i5400XT motherboard, 2GB of DDR2-667 FB-DIMM RAM, a 160GB Seagate SATA 2.0 hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT 512MB graphics card.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 was based upon Solaris Nevada Build 101b-rc2 with X Server 1.3.0, the NVIDIA 177.80 proprietary driver, GCC 3.4.3, the ZFS file-system, and Java SE 1.6.0_10-b33. OpenSolaris 2009.06 is based upon Solaris Nevada Build 111b, X Server 1.5.3, the NVIDIA 180.44 proprietary driver, the ZFS file-system, and Java SE 1.6.0_13-b03. With the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06, GCC 4.x is finally available through Sun's Image Packaging System. With that said, under our OpenSolaris 2009.06 testing we tested the OS with both GCC 3.4.3 and GCC 4.3.2.

All testing in this article was done through the Phoronix Test Suite. The test profiles we used were contained within the Nevada suite and consisted of Java 2D Microbenchmark, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, timed PHP compilation, 7-Zip compression, LZMA compression, GnuPG, OpenSSL, dcraw, Threaded I/O Tester, BlogBench, GraphicsMagick, BYTE Unix Benchmark, CacheBench, C-Ray, POV-Ray, Sudokut, Sunflow Rendering System, and the Bork File Encrypter.