Fedora 20 Runs Great On The Intel Bay Trail NUC

Aside from needing to update Fedora 20 for having a new kernel with better graphics support and then running into the Linux 3.13 kernel EFI issue that meant switching to a Linux 3.14 Rawhide kernel, Fedora Linux was running fine on this new Intel NUC Kit.

For the testing Fedora 20 x86_64 was used with the Linux 3.14 kernel, Xfce 4.10 (I opted for the Xfce spin over the default GNOME Shell version for being lighter-weight on this low-power hardware), Mesa 9.2.5, and GCC 4.8.2. With the Linux 3.14 kernel and Mesa 9.2, the Bay Trail / Valley View graphics were working out just fine during my OpenGL testing. However, for those that want to upgrade to a better experience there is an unofficial Copr repository that provides Mesa 10 for Fedora 20. Unfortunately, Mesa 10.x isn't coming down to Fedora 20 as a stable update.

For some new Intel Bay Trail benchmarks and seeing how Fedora is running against Ubuntu with these latest updates, I ran some fresh benchmarks using the Phoronix Test Suite. The results were from the updated Ubuntu 13.10 installation shared last month and then compared to Fedora 20 with Linux 3.14. The NUC Kit with Intel Celeron N2820 processor (the clock speed wasn't changed at all between switching to Fedora from Ubuntu, contrary to what's reported by the P-State driver) was loaded with 8GB of DDR3 system memory and a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. Another item worth pointing out is that Fedora's 3.14 Rawhide kernel defaults to the "powersave" mode with the Intel P-State driver while Ubuntu's mainline kernel PPA sets the hardware to the "performance" governor, but we'll see how it affects the results. Graphics tests weren't included in this article due to the Mesa differences.