Eight-Way BSD & Linux OS Comparison

First up with PostMark, Ubuntu 13.04 and the fellow Raring-based Linux Mint 15 were the fastest performers. All the Linux-based distributions were using an EXT4 file-system by default but the kernel versions and configurations varied. Running much slower than the Linux operating systems were the two BSD configurations: FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 and DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1. PC-BSD 9.1 uses ZFS by default while DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1 has the HAMMER file-system.

With the exception of Mageia 3 that was noticeably slower, the seven other Linux/BSD operating systems performed close to the same speed with the Fhourstones Connect-4 Solving benchmark even though the GCC compiler version had varied for each operating system.

With the Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver, Mageia 3 was slower than the other Linux distributions benchmarked. DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1 was running at the same level as the other Linux distributions, but PC-BSD 9.1 was much slower than the rest. PC-BSD 9.1 ships the LLVM/Clang 3.1 compiler by default and also GCC 4.2.1 as fallback, while other compiler versions are available through the FreeBSD Ports collection.

For the 7-Zip compression benchmark, the results aren't too interesting but now DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1 was the slowest performer. Aside from Mageia 3 still coming in weak, the other Linux distributions were running close to one another.