[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]
“At Phoronix we have been benchmarking the Linux kernel
on a daily basis using Phoromatic Tracker, a sub-component of
Phoromatic and the Phoronix Test Suite. We launched our first
system in the Linux kernel testing farm just prior to the Linux
2.6.33 kernel development cycle and found a number of notable
regressions during the past three months. Now with the Linux 2.6.34
kernel development cycle getting into swing, we have added an
additional two systems to our daily kernel benchmarking farm. One
of the systems is an Atom Z520 system but what makes it more
interesting is that the system is using a Btrfs file-system and
then the second new system added to the kernel tracker is a 64-bit
setup. However, to provide a historical look at the Linux kernel
performance, we have ran some fresh benchmarks going back to the
Linux 2.6.24 kernel and ending with the recently released Linux
2.6.33 kernel.“Our test system for this historical Linux kernel benchmarking
was made up of an AMD Opteron 2384 Shanghai Quad-Core processor, a
Tyan Thunder n3600B S2927 motherboard with NVIDIA nForce 3600PRO
Chipset, 4GB of ECC Registered DDR2 system memory, a 300GB Seagate
ST3300622AS Serial ATA hard drive, and an ATI FirePro V8700
graphics card. This AMD workstation was running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS
(x86_64) with the GNOME 2.22.3 desktop, X.Org Server 1.4.0.90, GCC
4.2.4, and an EXT3 file-system. For each of the Linux 2.6.24
through 2.6.33 kernels we obtained the 64-bit Linux kernels from
the Ubuntu mainline PPA. Besides swapping out the kernels, the
system was left in its stock configuration during all of the
testing.”