Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris Benchmarks

Last week we published the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks that compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of this Debian port -- that straps the FreeBSD kernel underneath a Debian GNU user-land -- to Debian GNU/Linux. We have now extended that comparison to put many other operating systems in a direct performance comparison to these Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze to Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

With Debian GNU/kFreeBSD using the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel, we threw the full FreeBSD 7.2 operating system into the comparison mix. FreeBSD 8.0 was added in since that is the latest FreeBSD stable release at this time. OpenBSD 4.6 was used as another *BSD comparison while OpenSolaris 2009.06 was used to represent some Sun Solaris numbers. Fedora 12 provides a look at some of the latest Linux packages available more so than the Debian snapshot from 2010-01-14. The 64-bit versions of all operating systems were used during this testing process.

The test system was maintained the same as our earlier Debian GNU/kFreeBSD testing, which was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M. All operating systems were left in their stock configurations as much as possible, but GNOME was installed (through each operating system's package management system) and running to provide some commonality. These tests are meant to look at the "out of the box" performance for each operating system.

Fedora 12 was running with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.7.1, GCC 4.4.2, and an EXT4 file-system. Debian GNU/Linux had the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, GNOME 2.28.2, X Server 1.6.5, GCC 4.3.4, and an EXT3 file-system. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD had the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel, GNOME 2.28.2, X Server 1.6.5, GCC 4.3.4, and an UFS file-system. FreeBSD 7.2 uses the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel, GNOME 2.26.0, X Server 1.6.0, GCC 4.2.1, and an UFS file-system. FreeBSD 8.0 has the 8.0 kernel, GNOME 2.26.3, X Server 1.6.1, GCC 4.2.1, and an UFS file-system. OpenBSD 4.6 runs with its 4.6 kernel, GNOME 2.24.3, X Server 1.5.3, GCC 4.2.4, and the FFS file-system. Finally, OpenSolaris 2009.06 is based upon Solaris Nevada 111b with the 5.11 kernel, GNOME 2.24.2, X Server 1.5.3, GCC 4.3.2, and a ZFS file-system.

A subset of the tests we published last week in our Debian GNU/kFreeBSD vs. Debian GNU/Linux benchmarking was used as all of those tests were not compatible with the other *BSD and OpenSolaris operating systems. The tests we wound up running were 7-Zip, Gzip, LZMA, GnuPG, Gcrypt, POV-Ray, C-Ray, John The Ripper, dcraw, Himeno, Threaded I/O Tester, PostMark, Sudokut, MAFFT, and Bullet Physics Engine. As always, all of this testing was managed and carried out through the Phoronix Test Suite.