Comments on: Comments on Phoronix Benchmarking openSUSE 11.1

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:27 +0000

Since I wrote this, I came across comments by Andrew Morton, and a thread discussing barriers and why he refused a patch to make them a default. The sequential layout of journal, in general means the disk does the writes in right order, except when wrapping round (relatively rare); meaning in general running without barriers is a problem only for the unfortunate.
Other filesystems like XFS, may frequently corrupt disk data files on power-failure, so running with a UPS supporting ordered shutdown is advisable.
One performance issue in 11.1 may be due to CPUFREQ demand governor, having an overly long sample size (at least on AMD X2 with Cool N’ Quiet), I was informed this will be reduced in a kernel update.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:57:53 +0000

I think it’s XAA, as Intel developed changed to EXA as a default after the 11.0 release.

By: Suzer Surya

Suzer Surya — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:54:06 +0000

Some feedback for Andreas Jaeger; Firstly your Suse 11 release was solid and fast (I ran many benchmarks and your results were good). Especially the Intel driver + OpenGL + Compositing/Compiz as well KDE4; especially your binary of Firefox 3 (30% faster) blew away both Swiftfox and SwiftWeasel which were supposed to be optimized to my exact core2duo x84_64. BTW could you confirm whether Suse 11.0 Intel driver uses XAA or EXA accel by default. However, Suse 11.1 has turned out to be mixed bag; more bad than good I’m afraid, especially the Intel Graphics performance, inconsistent repositories, missing apps for suse 11.1 repos, revision mismatches; clipper causing corruption in cut and paste during editing openoffice spreadsheets (corrupting production spreadsheets is a really bad thing) when using KDE4.1.3, wierd slowdowns with opensource radeon/radeonhd drivers, in ability even simple OpenGL apps like torcs to even launch (Segmentation Fault). The problems were such that I had to downgrade all our systems backdown to Suse 11.0 (which is fantastic, stable and consistent). With my systems back at Suse 11.0 – ZERO problems and really responsive desktops & servers, back to fresh installing to Suse 11.1 and the problems mentioned, re-manifest (my install media are fine and md5sum just fine). I can’t understand what happened with suse 11.1 after such a beautiful & clean release of Suse 11.0. But these benchmarks that you are commenting on above do not surprise me in light of all the other stuff we experienced here with 11.1.
PS is Suse 11.0 Intel driver using XAA or EXA as a default?

By: Dave P

Dave P — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:56:32 +0000

ext3’s performance is visibly slower than either xfs or reiserfs and definitely +1 for the robustness of xfs with system crashes an sudden power outages. Opensuse needs to seriously consider making xfs the default file system.

By: M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:42:47 +0000

If you want to do speed vs. safety tradeoffs on filesystems, you might as well do a *thorough* I/O subsystem tuning analysis, rather than just do half-assed benchmarks comparing community distros out of the box. If that stuff matters to you, you’re going to be using hardware RAID with battery-backed caches, you’re going to try all the filesystems under stress conditions, you’re going to be careful about file and filesystem placement, etc. And if you’re interested in high-speed graphics, you’ll use proprietary drivers rather than the open-source ones anyway.

By: Dean Hilkewich

Dean Hilkewich — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:55:00 +0000

Compiler optimizations are not the issue here. The issue is easily replicated on various setups.The same slowness is observed on P3 / K7 / K8 / P4 / Core’s / Phenoms / Xeons and is present in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of openSUSE.

By: Andreas Jaeger

Andreas Jaeger — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:56:32 +0000

Dan, thanks for the info. That explains Mandriva’s results.

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:56:33 +0000

Andreas: I discovered this article via a link from Roy Schestowitz’s attack on the performance of openSUSE using these benchmarks (I know, I know… what else is new, right?).

Anyhow, even though I am not an openSUSE user myself, I wanted to help you guys out and did a bit of research into your EXA vs XAA question and came up with the following link: http://www.nabble.com/-Cooker–ANN:-Acceleration-method-change-for-intel-driver-td20110862.html

It would appear that Mandriva was defaulting to XAA for Intel cards up until Oct 22nd, which was post release of Mandrake 10. It’s probably safe to assume that Mandriva Linux in the benchmarks was defaulting to XAA.

By: 6205

6205 — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:06:14 +0000

Hmm…no, i was at that time without a pc 🙁 Now i’m waiting for GM hoping it will work OK, because it’s better than Ubuntu in many ways, at least 11.0 was.

By: Andreas Jaeger

Andreas Jaeger — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:02:11 +0000

Compiler flags might play into it as well and could explain some noise.