Benchmarking Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD

We started with our SQLite benchmark that measures the time to process 12,500 insertions into a database. When comparing the 32-bit kernels, the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel with its UFS file-system wound up being faster than the Linux 2.6.30 kernel with EXT3. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD took 14% less time to complete this benchmark. However, when it came to the 64-bit performance, there was not a real difference between Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

With our test to measure how long it took GCC 4.3.4 to build out the ImageMagick program with the different ports, GNU/kFreeBSD was slower than GNU/Linux. The 32-bit performance for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was almost twice as slow as the 32-bit Debian with the standard Linux kernel. When comparing the 64-bit performance the GNU/kFreeBSD version ended up being only slightly slower.

Turning to x264 to run some H.264 video encoding benchmarks, the 32-bit version of Debian GNU/Linux was faster than Debian GNU/kFreeBSD by 30%. However, when looking at the 64-bit performance, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD operating system was 8% faster than the Linux version of Squeeze.

Starting our round of compression benchmarks was the 7-Zip test. The 32-bit version of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD faltered compared to Debian GNU/Linux, which was 18% faster. However, like the x264 test, when switching over to 64-bit packages the FreeBSD kernel led to a 23% advantage over Linux.