performance tests conducted on 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10rc

[Tim Hawkins]

This is a very subjective comment, but:

I have been playing with fedora 10 and ubuntu 8.10 on my netbook,  
(ACER aspire one, 1.5G Ram Atom CPU 1.6Ghz, 120G SATA drive,
  intel 945GE graphics chipset) .

Fedora 10 is significantly faster on desktop operations than intrepid,  
given that its running virtually the same kernel (2.6.27.x), and Xorg  
7.4 and the same intel 915 drivers, I am at a loss to explain the  
difference. Its not just subjective glxgears delivers 382fps on ubuntu  
8.10 and 560 fps on Fedora 10.  I have tried with and without  
INTEL_BATCH=1 enabled on both.  Both have DRI enabled.

Networking also feels snappier although I dont have an measurements,  
so that is subjective.

In general the Fed 10 install feels a lot snappier.

It might be worth looking at the build defaults for the packages and  
seeing if there is any significant difference.


On 28 Oct 2008, at 16:27, Kees Cook wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 11:02:37AM -0500, Chris Cheney wrote:
>> Since they only tested on i386 this (aiui) could at least be  
>> partially
>> explained by the security enhancements made to Ubuntu. I don't know  
>> what
>> all has been changed but I believe at least -PIE was added to  
>> binaries
>> at some point. There was discussion about this at a UDS and the fact
>> this would cause some slowdown for i386 in particular since it  
>> doesn't
>> have enough registers.
>
> Nothing they tested has been built with PIE.  We intentionally only
> built a few[1] network services with PIE, so that won't account for  
> it.
>
> There were some compiler defaults[2] changed (e.g.  
> _FORTIFY_SOURCE=2), but
> that's unlikely to make such a difference in their test times.  Most  
> of
> the checks are done at compile-time (which could certainly have
> contributed to the compiler slow-down, but I would bet that's mostly
> due to the 4.3 compiler, as mentioned earlier).
>
> -Kees
>
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/HardeningWrapper#Early%20PIE 
> %20Targets
> [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CompilerFlags
>
> -- 
> Kees Cook
> Ubuntu Security Team
>
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