"We had built the Linux 2.6.25, 2.6.26, 2.6.27, and 2.6.28
kernels from source using the same basic configuration on top of an
Ubuntu 8.10 installation. Besides the different kernel releases we
were using X Server 1.5.2, the NVIDIA 180.18 display driver, GCC
4.3.2, GNOME 2.24.1, and the stock EXT3 file-system. Our test
system consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor clocked at
4.00GHz, ASUS P5E64 WS Professional, 2GB of DDR3 memory, 160GB
Western Digital WD1600JS-00MHB0 SATA HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce
8600GTS 256MB graphics card.
"The tests we ran with the Phoronix Test Suite (Tydal Beta 1)
were Nexuiz, World of Padman, Lightsmark, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg
encoding, LZMA compression, GnuPG, OpenSSL, Java SciMark, SQLite,
IOzone, and Sunflow Rendering System. These tests and this article
are just intended to give a brief overview of the overall Linux
performance from recent kernel releases on this Intel Core 2
hardware."
