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.

[Enderandrew]

Does the Phonorix test suite even run on Windows yet? I don't think that's released yet.

Phonoroix does benchmark against the Mac all the time.

Re:Shocking.

[RanCossack]

Notice they didn't bother comparing any of them to either Windows 7 or Mac OS X. They wouldn't want open source to look bad, would they? LOL.

I know, right? Moblin's boot time can't hold a candle to Windows 7's, but the real powerhouse is Vista -- a boot time score higher than Moblin, Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora's all *combined*... and then *squared*.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dominate a game of golf.

How?

[Spety]

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.

Re:How?

[Enderandrew]

I thought you couldn't even install apps. Here they're installing the test suite, performing LZMA compressions, etc. Perhaps Chromium OS does more than we were led to believe it can do.

snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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]

Bejeweled. MS Word. MSN Messenger.

isn't caused by running familiar apps slowly, it's caused by being forced into inferior and unfamiliar facsimiles.

You could make that case about Bejeweled -- the official web version is deliberately crippled compared to the desktop version. However, the other two are very serious attempts by Microsoft to expose that functionality online. And I haven't covered alternatives -- Meebo and Google Docs come to mind.

If you really care about Linux performance...

[Silverlancer]

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.

Re:If you really care about Linux performance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuh uh! You aren't gonna get me to EVER click another link hosted in the .cx domain.

Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS".

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

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

[Vendetta]

Chrome BS.

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

[Tekfactory]

Funny, I thought Linux was a Kernel.

Since we're being pedantic and all.

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

[ZosX]

Indeed. The media really needs to quit talking about chromium. Nothing to see here, move along. Revloutionary? That makes me laugh. Its not even stateless as some have claimed. (Then again, I never really saw how that would work without a FS rewrite.) It is just linux with a web browser as the only interface. After using it for 2 minutes (the most it would give me before dumping to the login) I wanted to punch someone. If this is the direction where computing ends up going we need to figure out a way to sabotage the future. A web browser does not make a thin client. Repeat after me. I want my applications locally, where I can use them regardless of having a network or not. This is so anti-pc it makes me filled with rage. The whole world could burn down and I could still do my work with my PC (as long as I survived). Try doing that with chrome. Ask the t-mobile/sidekick/hiptop users out there how well cloud worked out for them. Could you imagine of Microsoft released Windows 8 as purely just internet explorer and loaded bing by default? Google already has datamined us way beyond anything M$ could have ever dreamed of, but where is the outcry over privacy? Any company that needs to use "do no evil" as a way to placate the masses has some serious fucking issues. Chromium seems purely to be another vehicle to guide them to the pearly gates.

I don't see it standing much of a chance. I don't think a great deal of thought actually went into it. It lacks so many basic features that I am kind of surprised they even released it. Like how do you log out or even shut down? It responds to ACPI requests (it is just linux) but there is nowhere on screen to power down. No desktop? No pretty background? Even android is a real OS compared to this. No nifty widgets? I don't see many people getting all that excited about running chrome and nothing but. I was kind of hoping for a competitor to ubuntu, but sadly this is not the case. Hats off to ubuntu btw for having the tightest netbook distro out there too! They are even beating xubuntu in memory usage right now.

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

[Tumbleweed]

Funny, I thought Linux was a Kernel.

Since we're being pedantic and all.

Pedantic-Man(tm) says you should not have capitalized the word 'kernel'. Just sayin'.

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

[DragonWriter]

Repeat after me. I want my applications locally, where I can use them regardless of having a network or not.

The intent is for that facility to be provided by web apps with offline functionality, something that has been important to Google since before Chrome OS was conceived (or, at least, announced as something they were working on.)

The whole world could burn down and I could still do my work with my PC (as long as I survived).

The only initial barrier to do that with Chrome seems to be that the first time a user logs on, network connectivity and a Google Account is required, although Google has stated that that initial limitation is just that: they want to work with other authentication sources, specifically they've cited having an OpenID alternative as a goal. While this still requires network connectivity, something as simple as a home LAN with an lightweight server doing authentication would work. And, since Chrome OS is targetted for netbooks, a certain degree of network dependency is not as critical as it would be if it was intended to be a general-purpose desktop OS.

Now, you may have an issue with the entire idea of a netbook-specific OS and prefer just a general purpose desktop OS with slight visual adaptation to the limit screen real estate -- and that's certainly a reasonable preference. But I don't think that all netbook users are going to share that preference.

I don't think a great deal of thought actually went into it.

I think that its pretty clear from reading the pages on the design and plans that a great deal of thought has gone into it.

I think its equally clear that what has been released has not realized all of the things that are planned for it, and that it is not intended to be a production release, a release candidate, a beta, or even an alpha release, but more an opening up of the development code base and the work-in-progress plans to public view and comment.

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.

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.

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...