Fedora 10 Preview results

[John Morris]

Have now tried the F10 Preview in three environments,  None worked 100%,
but it isn't all that bad either.

First try: QEMU 0.9.1

The installer hangs at the end.  Whenever I check back on it the screen
is black and the mouse is frozen.  But the install did complete,
rebooting starts the firstboot process normally.  Tried a second install
and had the same results.  Other than installing little further testing
was done as the VM was so slow as to be unusable.  This with kqemu
loaded and running and on a machine where F9 in qemu is somewhat
sluggish but usable.  Also, shutdown fails to 'power off' the VM.

Second try: pub_bd650caa-f279-438f-ba56-69ae904b66dd

Boot time, from GRUB to GDM login: 1:20
Time from login to desktop:        0:31 with the screen blank >25

Much better luck on real hardware.  Install worked without a hitch.
Compiz works out of the box.  No option for suspend or sleep and
hibernate doesn't work.  Plus shutdown doesn't power off but this isn't
anything new on this platform, power down has always been spotty and
sleep/suspend/hibernate has never worked.  Power down works on F6, F7
and F8, doesn't on RHEL5 (clone), F9 and F10Preview.

For grins I installed all of the sugar packages on this machine to have
a look at it.  The calculator is broken.  Everything else appears to
work in as much as it does what it appears it is intended to do... but
now I understand why countries buying the OLPC hardware are installing
XP.

Third try: pub_10f500cd-a672-4c4b-a40b-c52f6ba2a804

Boot time, from GRUB to GDM login: 0:55
Time from login to desktop:        0:13 with the screen blank >10

Got to see the new Plymouth eye candy on this machine.  Looks very
good.  Kills GL very dead.  Booting with nomodeset makes GL apps work,
including the compiz bling bling.  So pretty boot vs working compiz/GL
isn't much of a decision, if it can't be made to work reliably it needs
to be disabled by default.

This machine will power down at the end of a shutdown but hibernate
fails and sleep/suspend aren't offered as options.  Again, these power
management issues aren't new to F10.

One non-platform specific issue is that Firefox is launching larger than
the 1280x1024 panel on both of the real machines I tried.  No problem
for me to ALT-drag the menus and title bar into view but that would
confuse the heck out of a newbie.

When F9 came out I was hating on PackageKit with a lot of other people. 
The version on the F10 Preview install media was also broken but the
current rawhide looks like it is settling down quite nicely for F10
final.

If I had to pick one thing to complain about it would be the speed
drop.  F10 continues the trend toward slower performance on the same
hardware.  Boot time isn't bad but the time from login to the desktop
finishing to load is appalling and that should be happening more often
that booting anyway.

The machine that recorded the 31 second login is an Athlon64 with 2GB of
RAM in it, it isn't state of the moment but it ain't no obsolete piece
of junk either.  The hard drive is a old one from the bench but logging
in and out and right back in to ensure everything is in cache only cut
the time to 25 seconds so something else is the bottleneck.  Watching
top during a login it appears Xorg is the CPU hog.

To provide a couple of reference datapoints for the bloat over time,
here is the time to login for several previous releases running on the
same machine.  The model of drive is noted because it is the only other
variable between versions.  All measurements with compiz disabled and
from a cold start.
 
Fedora Core 5	6	Maxtor 51536U3
Fedora Core 6	15*	Western Digital WD200
Fedora 7	9	Maxtor 51536U3
Fedora 8	26	Maxtor 51536U3
Fedora 9	Couldn't locate that drive
Fedora 10P	31	Maxtor 6E030L05

* Everything except the date/time is on the screen by 11 seconds.

If the goal is to make Linux as slow as Windows Vista break out the
"Mission Accomplished" banners.  Otherwise improving performance really
needs to become a bigger priority than new features and rewriting
existing ones for the Nth time.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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