PCLinuxOS 2010 Runs Against, But Falls Short Of Ubuntu 10.04

While a bulk of the Linux community is engaged by the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS next week, another popular Linux distribution put out its first major update of 2010 a few days ago. PCLinuxOS, the Mandriva-based OS that is one of the top 10 most popular Linux distributions according to DistroWatch, is out with this update that bumps their kernel to Linux 2.6.32.11 while still carrying the BFS scheduler, updated NVIDIA and ATI driver support, locale improvements, and much more. We have a few benchmarks up this morning of PCLinuxOS 2010 compared to the latest snapshot of Ubuntu 10.04.

As this was just some weekend benchmarking to satisfy the requests of some readers interested in the performance of PCLinuxOS 2010 seeing as it carries the BFS scheduler and other uncommon settings/packages, we just ran a few tests and simply compared its performance to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (a daily snapshot from 2010-04-24) to use as a baseline for looking at the performance of this Linux OS. We were using the i586 GNOME spin of PCLinuxOS 2010 that uses the Linux 2.6.32-11-pclos2 kernel, X.Org Server 1.6.5, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.4, Mesa 7.5.2, GCC 4.4.1, and the EXT4 file-system. While PCLinuxOS uses the Brain Fuck Scheduler that is not found in the mainline kernel and other changes, some of these PCLinuxOS 2010 packages are particularly outdated, like the open-source graphics stack. The major package versions in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS include the Linux 2.6.32-21-generic kernel, GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, xf86-video-radeon 6.13.0, GCC 4.4.3, Mesa 7.7.1, and the EXT4 file-system.

These weekend performance tests of PCLinuxOS 2010 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS were carried out on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 with an Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00, and ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 128MB graphics. The tests included World of Padman, Apache, PostgreSQL, PostMark, C-Ray, OpenSSL, GraphicsMagick, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, x264, and FFmpeg. These tests were, of course, run through the Phoronix Test Suite.