A Big Operating System Benchmark Comparison

[vermaden]

@L33F3R

Heh, yeah

[AdrenalineJunky]

actually - that is the most logical way to perform this test - as shows how they compare based on configurations that the vast majority of people use.

recompiling everything would be pretty much pointless because relatively very few people would have thier system set up like that.

[vermaden]

only nvidia and amd have a solution to have the same driver base to windows,macos and linux.

So read this part again:

Many people scream to use ATI or nVidia cards, but AMD does not provide their drivers to NetBSD and FreeBSD, nVdidia only provides i386 driver for FreeBSD, but there is no amd64 version, and no version for NetBSD either.

There WILL be diffrences in drivers and so, but ALL tested systems have ACCELRATED 2D/3D drivers for Intel cards.

AMD does not offer ANY drivers for FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenSolaris.

nVidia only offers limited i386 driver for FreeBSD and NOTHING for NetBSD.

The other way to be EQUAL for all systems will be using some old graphics card/untypical card where ALL systems will be forced to use 2D VESA driver to accomplish same slowdown everywhere ...

[VinzC]

gentoo is probably too much trouble to install, but would be nice to know if it's actually faster if well-maintained.

If one candidate fits best for benchmarking it's Gentoo, IMHO. It would reflect to what extent one could fit a Linux distribution to the target CPU to get the best performance and to what extent the performance gain is worth the pain.

I also think we need to see gentoo represented in this benchmark. You can argue that there is no such thing as a stock gentoo - but why not just make a basic install and some sane USE and CFLAGS and specify these in the benchmark alongside all the other distro specifications. It would be very interesting to see what difference gcc flags make.

I couldn't agree more on that. Gentoo has always been advertised as the fastest distribution due to the high control over compilation flags -- not that I agree with that assertion but I'd also like to see how much it's different. BTW Optimizing Gentoo is not trivial but I'd like to see what results the best, sane optimization gives.

I would suggest benchmarking a stable ARCH (x86_64) against a recent Intel CPU with GCC 4.3.2 and sse4.1, for instance. And for bleeding-edgers, a ~ARCH (~x86_64) with the latest GCC 4.4.x, to see what impact the recent optimizations has over the whole system.

But in general, I would expect Gentoo to have (sane) CFLAGS adapted to the target CPU only.

[deanjo]

macos has diverend compiler to macos use the intel compiler much much much faster than the GCC compiler!

What are you smoking? OS X's compiler is GCC. 10.6 will also feature clang with LLVM. No intel compiler at all. It should also be noted that SSE3 is really only useful on processors with long pipelines (read: P4).

Edit: I should clarify that a bit more. SSE3 typically only shows huge gains when used with a processor that has long pipelines.

[T_Beermonster]

I'd be interested to see Dragonfly BSD thrown into the mix. The HAMMER filesystem is supposedly now production ready and the kernel architecture has diverged from the other free BSDs.

[vermaden]

@T_Beermonster

HAMMER filesystem is not a ZFS rival or something like that, its developed to work in cluster environments.

Abou DragonflyBSD itself, it scales as FreeBSD 4.x (DragonflyBSD forked from FreeBSD 4.8) and works well only with single core CPUs, it does not use more then one core, its still big GIANT LOCK kernel.

Check these benchmarks below:

http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly-mysql.png

http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly-write.png

So adding DragonflyBSD to the test will not bring nothing new here, it is and will be slow, until they rewrite SMP subsystem as it has been done in FreeBSD 4.x --> 8.x

[DDevine]

@T_Beermonster

Check these benchmarks below:

http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly-mysql.png

http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly-write.png

Absolutely pwnt by FreeBSD!

So adding DragonflyBSD to the test will not bring nothing new here, it is and will be slow, until they rewrite SMP subsystem as it has been done in FreeBSD 4.x --> 8.x

True dat.

The DragonflyBSD had good intentions for forking but so far it hasn't gone too well. When they get SMP they might be back on the map.

[L33F3R]

what about a very very very very very old linux distro. One with a very very very very very old kernel. That would drastically show the linux evolution whether good or bad.

[deanjo]

what about a very very very very very old linux distro. One with a very very very very very old kernel. That would drastically show the linux evolution whether good or bad.

Most old distro's would have a hissy fit with the newer hardware.