“With both laptop systems configured, lab personnel
were ready to calibrate the OmniBook’s base CPU, memory and
streaming I/O performance under each OS. Technicians began with
their CPU benchmark, which executes 34 numerically intensive
kernels, both integer and floating point. The results here were
very much in line with OpenBench Labs’ first tests of the Linux 2.4
kernel near the beginning of the year.At that time, HP found the performance gap between Linux and
Windows 2000 to have been closed to about 18 percent from previous
observations, which had been in the range of 20 to 25 percent. Once
again, the difference between the geometric means for the 34
kernels was on the order of 18 percent, with Windows XP Pro
clocking in at 240 and SuSE 7.3 clocking in at 203. Nonetheless,
within a 95 percent confidence interval, performance was almost
identical. This is a function of more variability in performance
among the 34 kernels when run on Linux. The variability is
especially prevalent on the high end since a number of kernels
execute significantly faster on Linux than Windows XP.On SuSE 7.3, technicians utilized a logical volume formatted
with the Reiser File System (ReiserFS), which is a journaled,
extent-based file system. In theory, a journaled file system should
have an edge in performance when checking the file during boot-up
and when issuing writes. Reads are supposedly more vulnerable to
degradation due to fragmentation of the extents. Nonetheless, for
small block transfers, Linux now held an advantage over Windows XP
Pro. For sequential disk I/O, it was Windows XP Pro that rapidly
converged on SuSE 7.3, which delivered throughput on the order of
15 MB per second as read sizes grew larger than 8 KB.”