Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ARMv7 Linux Performance Gains

7-Zip compression, N-Queens, and OpenSSL all yield huge performance boosts in Ubuntu 12.04 over Ubuntu 11.10 for the OMAP4-based PandaBoard ES.

If running other newer Linux distributions on the OMAP4460 development board, similar performance boosts should be visible. The ARM performance improvements here are not exactly original innovations out of Canonical, aside from their decision to switch to ARM hard-float by default. The proper OMAP4460 cpufreq support is in the upstream kernel now compliments of Texas Instruments and there is other general ARMv7 optimizations going on within the Linux kernel, GCC (and LLVM/Clang) compilers, etc.

Coming up next from Ubuntu 12.04 on ARM are GCC vs. LLVM/Clang compiler benchmarks.