Debian Testing: FreeBSD 10.0 vs. Linux 3.14 Kernels

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD remains an interesting port of Debian that pairs its GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel. With the Debian testing code for Testing / Jessie 8.0 is the new FreeBSD 10.0 kernel. The benchmarks today at Phoronix are comparing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux using the latest 7.5 Wheezy release along with the latest testing code.

From an Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition system with Radeon HD 4870 graphics, 8GB of RAM, and 64GB OCZ Vertex solid-state drive, the four Debian configurations were tested. Clean installations were done each time and the stock settings/packages were used. Some of the key information for these Debian OS configurations include:

- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.5 ships with the FreeBSD 9.0-2 kernel, Xfce 4.8, GCC 4.7, and Mesa 8.0. The UFS file-system is used by default with the Debian Installer.

- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for Jessie ships with the FreeBSD 10.0-1 kernel, GCC 4.8, and Mesa 10.1. The UFS file-system is used by default with the Debian Installer.

- Debian GNU/Linux 7.5 ships with the Linux 3.2 kernel and the GNOME Shell 34.4.2 while the rest of its user-land is comparable to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.5.

- Debian GNU/Linux for Jessie currently has the Linux 3.14 kernel and GCC 4.8. The EXT4 file-system is used by default on the Linux versions of Debian.

All of this Debian benchmarking was handled in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite results.