Debian: Squeeze vs. Wheezy On Linux And kFreeBSD

With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 "Squeeze" to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

The stock Debian 6.0.5 packages for Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were compared to the latest test packages for what is making up Wheezy. Debian GNU/Linux on Squeeze had the Linux 2.6.32 kernel with GNOME 2.30.2 desktop and GCC 4.4.5 with a default EXT3 file-system. With Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy, it is now the Linux 3.2 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.4.1, GCC 4.7, and an EXT4 file-system. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD meanwhile went from shipping the FreeBSD 8.1 kernel to now FreeBSD 9.0 while using a matching compiler to what is found in Debian GNU/Linux (going from GCC 4.4.5 to 4.7). [For those unfamiliar with the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port, see the many Phoronix articles on the less-known operating system.]

A Lenovo ThinkPad W510 was used for this test system with an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU, 4GB of RAM, and an Intel 160GB SSD.