Ubuntu 12.04 LTS KVM Virtualization Battles 8.04.4, 10.04.4 LTS

When starting with a single instance of Dbench to represent some light disk workload, we see that the numbers for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have improved across the board. Ubuntu 12.04's disk performance for this SSD-based quad-core Opteron workstation improved when on bare metal without virtualization and this also translated to improvements when using KVM virtualized guests of 12.04 LTS and 8.04.4 LTS. The KVM virtualized guests under an Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS did show the highest numbers, but with the virtualized disk results being even faster than bare metal, back with EXT3-based Hardy Heron the sync/fsync requests to the disk were clearly not being honored. Fortunately, that has been corrected.

The multi-threaded TTSIOD 3D Renderer (it's all CPU based) performance did improve under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. However, when using KVM virtualization its performance has regressed compared to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with KVM virtualization from two years ago.

Image resizing with the OpenMP-based GraphicsMagick is largely unchanged when comparing these three Ubuntu Long-Term Support versions.