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Comments: 193 +- Technology: Chrome OS Benchmarked Against Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook, More on Monday November 23, @02:33PM
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday November 23, @02:33PM
from the feels-a-little-like-apples-to-oranges dept.
from the feels-a-little-like-apples-to-oranges dept.
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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."
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Submission: Chrome OS Benched Against Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook by Anonymous Coward
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Shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Funny)
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".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Informative)
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 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 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.
Parent
Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, I thought Linux was a Kernel.
Since we're being pedantic and all.
Parent
Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS". (Score:5, Funny)
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'.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you're probably right. He has, after all, demanded that Linux/Slackware rename itself, as well as Linux/Debian, and Linux/Suse and ...
Oh wait, that hasn't really happened, has it?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Each distro includes distro-specific kernel patches. They configure the kernel differently. They ship different releases of the kernel. And they compile with slightly different versions of the toolchain.
So you will see benchmark differences with the "same" kernel on different distros.
I'm shocked to read the Chromium is eschewing Ext4. What FS are they using, and it it because it is optimized for SSDs?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Either that, or the left hand and the right hand need to have a little sit down and chat in the immediate future...
Re: (Score:2)
The justification may very well be that, as this is a project largley in its infancy, they're sticking to a more conservative configuration at the bottom end. You don't expect any development project at this stage to be looking at optimization anyways. Stability is more important, and once you've got that, then you start plugging in more high performance functionality.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We're using ext3 because that's what the bootloader supports right now. The plan is to move to ext4.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe it's currently syslinux
Whilst I love grub for my desktop, it's not the best choice for an embedded type system where we want minimal code and maximum speed.
I'm looking to see if we can replace with lilo, and not have filesystem code in the bootloader
Re:Shocking. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Shocking. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
How? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is a confusion about what "native application" means - Linux apps vs native code. It does support Native Client - http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Even if it was, Chrome isn't in the same game that Fedora, Ubuntu and Opensuse are. Chrome is designed to rely heavily on net applications, the others are designed to rely much more on the desktop. Comparing them to Chrome is nothing less than comparing Apples to Oranges.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Comparing them to Chrome is nothing less than comparing Apples to Oranges.
I've never heard of an Orange. Is it similar to an Apple Mac?
:P
Re: (Score:2)
No but there are tangerines [wikipedia.org] and apricots [actapricot.org] does that help?
Orange Micro (Score:3, Informative)
snake oil (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Feh (Score:2)
Seven pages to tell us that they're pretty much the same? And Chrome's power management sucks? I'm wondering why they didn't do a Windows test, too. I thought that would be a requirement in these types of tests.
Re:Feh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Phoronix is a Unix, Linux, Solaris site, they never bother with testing windows. The results would be of little interest to their target audience.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzY1MA [phoronix.com]
The most boring benchmarking ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The most boring benchmarking ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Chromium can boot in 3 seconds.
So basically no offline (relatively speaking) functionality and can boot in 3 seconds. Yay?
It boasts a new UI.
Yes, it looks like Chrome.
It will bring Linux to the masses.
Not really. I would barely call this Linux. I guess it uses a Linux kernel, but it has little similarities past that, as far as I can tell. I know, Linux == Kernel, but ...
I really don't see much of a threat at all right now. It's a huge push for thin-client. Not everyone wants a thin client. I wouldn't want a thin client, even on a netbook, since I don't have internet access everywher
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So basically no offline (relatively speaking) functionality and can boot in 3 seconds. Yay?
All the web apps are using Gears, which caches everything for offline use. So all the apps will be usable offline. Your data is stored in the cloud, but also cached to the SSD. So it isn't fair to say it doesn't function offline.
Yes, it looks like Chrome.
I can't imagine I'll pass up KDE for this myself, but it passes the Grandma test. They know how to use a web browser already. You plug in a camera, a little overlay shows the camera. You literally drag and drop a photo from the camera to a Google Talk overlay, and it sends to the pi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
their documents are all Google documents ("what? what if it's a Microsoft Word document?" ...) and you need to type that in the address bar...
Neither of these are required. I just watched a demo in which someone plugged an SD card into a laptop running Chrome OS -- it popped up a filesystem browser. They found an excel document, clicked it, and it opened in the Web version of Microsoft Excel.
So, they're working on it, but there is definitely a model for running applications that happen to be webpages.
Re: (Score:2)
It will make Microsoft shit their pants.
Will it, really? I don't think so. They are still going to sell W7 and Office and life will go on for Microsoft. And when people get Chrome and boot it up only to find IE8, Word, and Excel don't exist, and the inability to install Favorite Shareware application foo, then we'll be right back to square fucking one.
*shrug*
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft went nuts doing their best to stop Best Buy and other retailers from selling Linux in retail. They won't stop retailers from selling a Chrome netbook.
That alone proves that Microsoft will panic.
With Chrome gain 10% market share in a year? Maybe not. But Firefox grew slowly over several years, and I suspect Chrome could follow a similar growth chart. Most end-users don't install an OS on their own period. They get an OS when they buy a PC.
Given that retailers will sell this, it will be fast, secure
Re: (Score:2)
The fastest I've heard from Moblin is 5-10 seconds. I'm not knocking 5 seconds. That's pretty impressive. But Chrome is smoking fast.
Re:The most boring benchmarking ever. (Score:4, Informative)
Bejeweled [vx4.com]. MS Word [officelive.com]. MSN Messenger [live.com].
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.
Parent
If you really care about Linux performance... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If you really care about Linux performance... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Program loader, not a true OS (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
What on earth makes you think that an OS running a multiprocess browser has no scheduler?
Not the banchmarks I care for. (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
According to xe.com, the Mark is currently about 0.46 Pounds. [xe.com]