Chrome OS Benchmarked Against Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook, More

An anonymous reader writes "Using the latest build of Google's Chromium OS source code, Phoronix built it out to run on a Samsung netbook and ran sixteen benchmarks, putting it up against Moblin 2.1, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, openSUSE 11.2, and Fedora 12. They ran some of their usual desktop benchmarks (encoding, video, etc..), but more interestingly they ran a number of battery, CPU usage, and memory consumption tests under different settings that show some of the advantages and disadvantages for each of the Linux distributions, and spotted a few bugs along the way."

Comments

Shocking.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Similar linux kernels perform mostly similarly on identical hardware, except for the pre-production one that they probably haven't bothered to polish for any particular real-world hardware yet.

Re:Shocking.

[LandDolphin]

Why reinvent the wheel? Use those resources to work on the "improved".

Re:Shocking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously comparing a Kernel, filesystem, and userland utilities, against an mp3 player? Really? Do you realize the amount of work and testing that would have to go into writing a kernel from scratch? Besides having a subsystem that has stood the test of time, you have a piece of code that has had millions of dollars invested into it from IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, and a slew of other companies, not to mention individual man hours. It is much easier to tear down an existing kernel than to build up a new one not to mention the fact that implementing drivers would be yet another headache as either hardware vendors or google engineers would have to write drivers that already exist.

On a side note on your stupid comparison. Most Mp3 players rely on the same mp3 libraries on the lower level and differ in usability, you know the higher level stuff?

The most boring benchmarking ever.

[w0mprat]

All the distros were very close in performance with the exception of one or two benchmarks. 10% is not a perceptable difference. Wake me up when Chrome fever is over and something interesting is posted about it.

Re:The most boring benchmarking ever.

[Enderandrew]

Chromium can boot in 3 seconds. That is more than a 10% difference.

It boasts a new UI. It is going to be supported by more vendors as an OEM install than Linux ever had. It will bring Linux to the masses. It is designed to be secure. It will make Microsoft shit their pants.

That's good enough for me.

Re:The most boring benchmarking ever.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I guess Gears works at any rate, but that strikes me as a hack.

Gears is attempting to converge with the HTML5 offline stuff. It's a good idea for web apps in general, and it happens to be usable for the Chrome OS.

For example, you can't attach something to an e-mail in gmail's offline mode.

That strikes me as a limitation of Gmail, not Gears.

Re:Feh

[Bacon Bits]

Chromium's power management may not suck. It seems that Chromium is not using EIST, so the processor is always running at 1600 MHz whereas the other distros could scale the processor down to 800 MHz to save power. Given that this system had a SSD, the CPU likely accounts for the vast majority of power consumption.

But otherwise it was a pretty bland review.

Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS".

[Sinning]

Linux is an operating system. Chrome is a customized linux distrbution and therefore an operating system. Even if you don't like it.

Re:snake oil

[Sinning]

Actually, it will show which distribution will run best on your specific hardware. I agree that it's not meaningful to most. However, most is not all.

Program loader, not a true OS

[zorro-z]

As I watched the Google Chrome OS rollout, it occurred to me that, when it comes down to it, Chrome isn't so much a full OS as it is a program loader, a la DOS. As the presenter explained, most of what an OS does Chrome *won't* do- no scheduler, no other apps, barely a file system, etc. What it will do is load a Web browser, and then get out of the way. That strikes me as rather similar to the experience I had back in the day using SLIPNot to simulate a graphical browser over a SLIP connection.

This isn't a criticism; far from it. It may just be that precisely what netbooks need is a program loader to start a Web browser + then get out of the way, rather than a full-fledged OS to tax their limited- by design- resources.

Now, if I could just find a way to load SLIPNot on my Eee...

Re:Program loader, not a true OS

[oxfletch]

What on earth makes you think that an OS running a multiprocess browser has no scheduler?

Dualboot.

[nomorecwrd]

I think ChromeOS will be very useful as a second boot choice, when you are in a hurry (airport, hotspot, whatever) and need some info on the internet quick. Just turn on your netbook and get your info in a few seconds. To do the real job you have the OS of your choice as the primary boot (Linux or Windows)

I know, I know, you can always use hibernation and be also ready in a few more seconds, but note every note(net)book likes the hibernation.

Just my 2 pesos.

Re:snake oil

[Guspaz]

Not really; Chromium OS is designed to run one single application. Its performance for video encoding or 7-zip compression is completely meaningless; it will never be running any of those applications. Heck, they did all sorts of I/O benchmarks when Chrome OS doesn't really touch the disk except for caching.

The only meaningful benchmarks they could have run would be to compare various browser benchmarks between Chromium OS and Chrome running on different platforms on the same hardware.

Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS".

[mcrbids]

A more appropriate name for it is "Chrome Fullscreen".

An even more appropriate name for it is "Chrome's Google-Confusion-Fest". Because Google is starting to bewilder me with parallel, seemingly conflicting options!

1) There's Chromium O/S, which is pretty much just a Linux distro with a browser.

2) There's Android O/S, which is pretty much just a Linux distro with a browser, that's incompatible with Chromium.

3) There's Google Gears, which is pretty cool, but doesn't work with Chromium O/S, or Chrome the browser.

4) There's Chrome itself, whicch is just a browser, without a distro of any kind, and paradoxically, doesn't work on Linux.

In short, while Google has been lobbing all this juicy-looking stuff out onto the marketplace, it's been set up in such a way as the boxes are likely to fall on anxious developers.

This looks to me more like a minefield than a fruited plain!

Come on, Google! If you want me, a developer, to "jump on board" with your stuff, you'd better get it all talking to each other, because your deeply fragmented product lines are causing me to shun your products.