Linaro 12.12 Enhances ARM Linux Performance

For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is a round of ARMv7 performance benchmarks using Linaro 12.12. The Linaro 12.12 release from December was compared to Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux on the PandaBoard ES with its Texas Instruments OMAP4460 Cortex-A9 SoC.

To see where the latest monthly spin of Linaro and its stock PandaBoard image is at today, the Linaro 12.12 reference image for this OMAP4460 platform with dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.2GHz processor was compared to the stock images of Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux all supporting this OMAP4 development board. The stock packages/settings were used during this ARM Linux benchmarking.

Compared to Linaro 12.10, while Linaro 12.12 is still on the Linux 3.4 kernel for the PandaBoard/OMAP4 image, one of the prominent changes is upgrading to GCC 4.7. Linaro 12.10 was still on GCC 4.6 even when Ubuntu 12.10 shipped with the latest GCC 4.7 stable series. Fedora 17 and Arch Linux are also on GCC 4.7. Fortunately with this latest stable monthly release of Linaro, it's using this latest stable version of the GNU Compiler Collection that has various ARMv7 improvements.

This round of ARM Linux benchmarking is quite straightforward between the five tested ARMv7 OMAP4 Linux distributions, so let's get straight to the results.