"Due to the performance regressions and other bugs
present in the Intel driver stack found in Ubuntu 9.04, it ended up
killing the netbook experience with many of these Atom-powered
netbooks using Intel 945 graphics (though the problem at hand
impacts all Intel IGPs). Since the release of Ubuntu 9.04, new
packages have started to roll in for Ubuntu 9.10 (a.k.a. The Karmic
Koala), but the situation is not yet better for Intel. In fact, in
some cases the performance is even worse.
"To see where Ubuntu's Intel stack is at, we had upgraded a
clean Ubuntu 9.04 installation to the latest Karmic packages as of
2009-05-06. We also enabled the xorg-edgers PPA to fetch the latest
Intel driver (an early xf86-video-intel 2.8 snapshot). Besides this
bleeding-edge Intel driver, Ubuntu 9.10 is tracking the Mesa 7.6
development code, the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, and on a side note it
has integrated GCC 4.4. This testing was done on a Dell Inspiron
Mini 9 netbook. We compared the Ubuntu 9.04 i386 performance to the
latest packages mentioned above. The defaults with each set of
packages were used, which means EXA in Ubuntu 9.04 and UXA in
Ubuntu 9.10. Testing was, of course, done by the Phoronix Test
Suite."
