The testing was done from a dual AMD Opteron 2384 system with 4GB of RAM and a 160GB Western Digital SATA drive; the same system was used across the three operating systems. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD with the 9.0.1-amd64 kernel was used on its stock UFS file-system, Debian GNU/Linux testing with the 3.2.01-amd64 kernel and stock EXT4 file-system, and FreeBSD 9.0 was used with the 9.0-RELEASE amd64 kernel. GCC 4.6 was used as the stock compiler available in the Debian land while PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0 has the older GCC 4.2.1 by default with LLVM/Clang 3.0 as its preferred option.
Those interested in seeing full system details, logs, and all of the results can find these numbers on OpenBenchmarking.org via 1202215-BY-FREEBSD9683.
More extensive BSD benchmarks are being planned to replace these February figures, especially now that DragonflyBSD 3.0 is out with better performance, NetBSD 6.0 is around, and other advancements out of both the Linux and *BSD camps.Continue on at OpenBenchmarking.org.