Early Ubuntu 14.04 Tests Show Some Performance Changes

If you have been wanting to take some time this holiday season to switch from Ubuntu 13.10 stable to the latest development packages for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, here's some quick benchmarks I did last week showing some of the performance changes to be found right now from using the latest Ubuntu 14.04 development packages.

The performance changes to find in Ubuntu 14.04 right now come from moving to the Linux 3.12 kernel (from 3.11 in Ubuntu 13.10) and for the open-source graphics drivers from the significant upgrade from Mesa 9.2 to Mesa 10.0. Before Ubuntu 14.04 is christened in April we should also see the Linux 3.13 kernel as part of the release and ideally a Mesa 10.1 release.

The benchmarking I did of Ubuntu 13.10 stock versus Ubuntu 14.04 20131209 was from a soon-to-be-reviewed Lini PC that featured a Haswell-based Intel Pentium G3220 CPU with Intel HD Graphics, 8GB of RAM, and 120GB Kingston SSD. Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 were left with their stock packages/settings and the Unity desktop environment.

All of this benchmarking was handled in a straightforward and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. Many more Ubuntu 14.04 benchmarks -- and from different x86 and ARM systems -- will come when past the feature freeze and closer to the official 14.04 release, the benchmarks today are just so any early adopters can get an early idea for Intel performance changes out of these Linux development packages.