Debian 7.0 GNU/Linux vs. GNU/kFreeBSD Benchmarks

[Serge]

My Kernel is better than your Kernel!. But I guess it's natural for Cousins to fight. When I switched from Windows last year I came an arms length away from installing PC-BSD, I liked the looks of it and the ease of installing Software via the PBIs. Further research lead me to believe that BSD lacked in Hardware support and Mainstream Software like Games; Torchlight for instance.

In the end I chose Xubuntu, been happy ever since. If push came to shove, I wouldn't let any kind of Pride stand in the way of me and switching to BSD. It would need to be something drastic, such as Microsoft buying all rights to the Linux Kernel, or something along those lines; but I think the posers at omgubuntu wouldn't mind that at all.

Mike, since the rights are spread between thousands of individuals, that would be an enormous undertaking on Microsoft's part. (It's also the reason why the debates over which version of the GPL the Linux kernel uses were pointless. The kernel was always stuck with v2 regardless of how Linus felt about v3.)

Also, even if somehow a single entity managed to acquire the rights to all of the code, or to enough of the code that re-writing the parts they don't control would not be so difficult, that code would still remain licensed under the GPL v2 retroactively. It's only future releases that they could change the license to, and hence close or restrict freedoms. In other words, it'd get forked.

So, just saying, there's nothing to worry about in that regard.

[stevenc]

*Cough!* *Aherm!*

A benchmark on a different system today showing GNU/kFreeBSD ahead of Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and PC-BSD in a couple of places:

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1306097-UT-OSCOMPARE58

That's actually pretty cool; GNU/kFreeBSD as a whole has had almost no work done to optimize for speed yet. Some tools that would help with this have not been packaged yet.

The default plain UFS filesystem operates in the safest possible mode, without write cache or journalling and that could be a major bottleneck on slower disks. Maybe that's why it performed better here, on an SSD. This is likely to change soon to UFS+softupdates or UFS+J, and should be an easy performance boost for the next release.

[Mike Frett]

Yippee-ki-yay

My Kernel is better than your Kernel!. But I guess it's natural for Cousins to fight. When I switched from Windows last year I came an arms length away from installing PC-BSD, I liked the looks of it and the ease of installing Software via the PBIs. Further research lead me to believe that BSD lacked in Hardware support and Mainstream Software like Games; Torchlight for instance.

In the end I chose Xubuntu, been happy ever since. If push came to shove, I wouldn't let any kind of Pride stand in the way of me and switching to BSD. It would need to be something drastic, such as Microsoft buying all rights to the Linux Kernel, or something along those lines; but I think the posers at omgubuntu wouldn't mind that at all.

[ncopa]

strlcpy

-It's also found that OpenBSD's crappy strlcpy and strlcmp are actually far more dangerous then the normal strcpy and strcmp. And they have been put into BSD libc. GNU libc has not.

But you are aware that the Linux kernel developers disagree with you (and Ulrich Drepper) here?

http://lwn.net/Articles/33812/

I don't know if you pay attention to what is going on in linux development but it seems to me that the Linux kernel developers are replacing the strcpy/strncpy with strlcpy:
There have been various patches like this recently:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/2405021/

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/2409161/

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/2409461/

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/2409451/

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/2419281/

...

[dungeon]

I would like to see a three-way comparison with Linux, kFreeBSD and Hurd.

Would be pretty cool if Debian could get a Solaris, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and MINIX kernel too.

First three are there, but Debian solaris variant is in the works right now... have livecd and can run X

http://osdyson.org/news/22

http://osdyson.org/projects/dyson/wiki

[dee.]

Now, given that FreeBSD in general is safer and more stable, no one should really care.

Sour grapes...

[kraftman]

Some of the largest webservers run Windows. There goes your point.

So, you're saying Windows is faster and safer than BSD? The most servers run on Linux and when comes to stock exchanges there were only from Windows to Linux migrations.

[uid313]

Hurd

I would like to see a three-way comparison with Linux, kFreeBSD and Hurd.

Would be pretty cool if Debian could get a Solaris, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and MINIX kernel too.

[kraftman]

Now, given that FreeBSD in general is safer and more stable, no one should really care.

In your dreams. Linux is used in the most demanding workloads not BSD. Linux is also more safe and provides more security mechanisms. BSD is worse in every case, it seems. One should ask a question: why do they even care to provide kfreebsd kernel? It's so typical for bsd fanboys and trolls: bsd is faster! Benchmarks show it's not. So, bsd is more safe! Reality show it's not. So, it must be more stable! Again, reality show it's not. The last two things cannot be proven easily, but if it was more safe and stable it would be used in the most demanding workloads and environments where security is a priority. Nothing like this has place.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian 7.0 GNU/Linux vs. GNU/kFreeBSD Benchmarks

Up this morning are benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.0, the version of the Debian operating system that ships the GNU user-land but replaces the Linux kernel from that of FreeBSD 9.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM4NzQ