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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."
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.
Are CPU and memory usage statistics even available in the current build of Chrome OS? I don't remember seeing them when I ran the version that was posted as a VMWare image.
Benchmarking operating system distributions in such a way is only useful for regression testing. Benchmarking operating systems that are designed only to run only on specific hardware against operating systems designed to run on as much hardware as possible won't provide any meaningful results.
They didn't even use the same file system for each install.
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.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
There's been an enormous improvement in the Linux scheduler in recent months--in some cases the performance improvements are as high as 60-80% with simple multithreaded apps like video encoders. The instant 2.6.32 comes out officially, expect to start seeing some completely absurd results in stupid "comparisons between Linux distros" like these, where the distros that happened to update to .32 trash the ones that haven't yet.
Face it, "Chrome OS" isn't an operating system in any way. It's a web browser running on a Linux distribution. Nothing more, nothing less.
A more appropriate name for it is "Chrome Fullscreen".
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.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Phoronix is a Unix, Linux, Solaris site, they never bother with testing windows. The results would be of little interest to their target audience.
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...
-Z
While Ubuntu Netbook Remix (soon to be "Edition") owns Moblin in most graphs the reason I switched to moblin was because of its fast start up, about about 20 seconds.
Another distro xPUD boots in about 10 seconds, but flash doesn't work out of the box.
However, while youtube runs beautifully in moblin (including fullscreen!) other flash games are too slow and there is still no shockwave, so what I want is a linux that boots fast, runs flash ok and runs shockwave somehow (maybe with wine?) and the more of these features that run out of the box the better, for anything else I can use the terminal.
But... the future refused to change.
Back when Macs still used 68000 series CPUs, Orange Micro made single-board PCs that plugged into a NuBus slot on a Macintosh II, allowing Mac owners to run MS-DOS and Windows and their apps.
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.