Fedora Core 5 Benchmarks

Since the inception of the Fedora Core Project, thanks in part to Red Hat, Fedora has been largely leading the way for other distributions to be based upon it as well as setting the bar for future Linux distributions. Since the release of Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) in November of 2003, the Fedora Foundation has been aiming at providing major updates approximately every nine months, and thus far they have stunned users every time with these releases -- Yarrow (Core 1), Tettnang (Core 2), Heidelberg (Core 3), and Stentz (Core 4). In fact, even though Fedora Core 5 is not out of the starting gates yet, planning has already begun for Fedora Core 6, which will likely premiere in late 2006 or early 2007. The release of Fedora Core 5 is quickly approaching, and is tentatively scheduled for March 15; however, the third and final test build has been released to the testing and development community. Fedora Core 5 Test 3 features GCC v4.1.0, KDE v3.5.1, GNOME v2.13.91, Linux kernel 2.6.15, and X.Org v7.0. The release of Fedora Core 5 Test 3 (FC5T3) also marks the continual development freeze until the official launch, and in this time only critical issues will be resolved. However, today at Phoronix is our first official examination of Fedora Core 5 when it comes to its benchmarking performance against that of Fedora Core 4. With that said, just how prepared is Fedora Core 5 for hitting prime time? We shall see today as we evaluate some of its possibilities.

Throughout this article, we will be displaying several benchmarks comparing Fedora Core 5 Test 3 against the previous Fedora Core 5 Test 2, an updated version of Fedora Core 4, and finally the stock version of Fedora Core 4 released on June 13, 2005. In the benchmarks, the above listed system specifications were used. For the updated Fedora Core 4 trials, we used the latest official Linux kernel (2.6.15-1.1831_FC4), X.Org (6.8.2-37), and other updates available from Fedora's official servers. In Fedora Core 5 Test 2, we simply used the stock installation as well as with Fedora Core 5 Test 3, and in these two runs, we did not perform any updates from any stable or Rawhide servers. The benchmarks we are running today are primarily CPU centric, and upon the official launch of Fedora Core 5 next month we will likely deliver a great deal of additional benchmarks in all areas from GNOME performance to native gaming benchmarks. Our set of tests today consisted of Gzip compression timing, LAME compilation timing. LAME encoding, FreeBench, RAMspeed, and Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product.