How Three BSD Operating Systems Compare To Ten Linux Distributions

[profoundWHALE]

Where's FreeBSD in this? PC-BSD isn't a good test for FreeBSD because its a downstream distribution of it.

???

And where the hell is NetBSD? That would have been interesting to say the least.

It wouldn't have hurt, but I appreciate what is there nonetheless.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Michael, have you done any 3D / graphics performance benchmarks between BSD and Linux before?

E.g., Supertuxkart and Open Arena with the Nvidia proprietary driver on BSD and Linux? A FOSS graphics stack benchmark would be interesting as well.

[rhavenn]

Props to FreeBSD / PC-BSD for hanging in there and even out right winning a few benchmarks. Hopefully, that will shift a few peoples' opinions about FreeBSD.

Thanks Michael for running the tests.

[wikinevick]

I wonder the linux distributions vary so much among them.

Very interesting ... my conclusions: FreeBSD/PCBSD is basically at the same level and sometimes beats the performance behind the best linux distributions. OpenBSD may be very secure but performance just sucks, perhaps because they are so late in getting real SMP support.

[rabcor]

PCBSD and Dragonfly look pretty nice. Clearlinux also coming in strong. OpenBSD... Lol.

[SystemCrasher]

Was ashift set correctly on the ZFS vdevs? To answer the obvious response. There is no default. The setting depends on what the hardware reports and if the hardware lies it is blindly trusted. Were the distributions using XFS configured to give it a 4K block size?

I think Michael does right thing: testing how it performs out of the box. That's what most users would actually see. Sorry, but demanding everyone to detect block sizes and somesuch just not going to work. So either defaults perform adequately or you get crappy results and users are being unhappy - for a reason. Getting some extras after proper tuning is good, but things should work reasonably by default, out of the box. Else its crappy code or crappy defaults, crappy (sub)systems and so on. That's how users would see it.

Whatever, but we have real world full of ignorant users and imperfect hardware full of odds, bugs and quirks. It would be better if HW is perfect, etc. But it not going to happen. Ignoring this fact is .. ahem, naive.

P.S. hmm, PC-BSD wasn't worst of the bunch and even won in some cases. Not bad for BSD . Though I think it is fair to test Linux distros on more assorted filesystems to get idea what various designs can do and how it compares. I think it is reasonable to compare btrfs, zfs, xfs and ext4 on HDD & SSD and f2fs on SSDs, etc? Sure, test matrix happens to be quite large. Also, FreeBSD or clones are good to run on ZFS and UFS2. Let's see if claims of BSD fans about UFS2 are at least half-true.

[SystemCrasher]

OpenBSD may be very secure

Uhm, yeah, they just finished round of security fixes in very secure openssh. Sorry, but if you pedal security too much, you're going to be eaten on slightest vuln. And these two recent vulns were quite big, actually.

[Michael]

Michael, have you done any 3D / graphics performance benchmarks between BSD and Linux before?

E.g., Supertuxkart and Open Arena with the Nvidia proprietary driver on BSD and Linux? A FOSS graphics stack benchmark would be interesting as well.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_games_bsd&num=1

[RedShift]

Why again the comparison of ext4/XFS vs. ZFS? This is not an equal test!

[trilean]

Interesting...I wonder why Clear Linux is so much ahead in some benchmarks. Especially CPU bound benchmarks like Compile Bench where the OS doesn't really have to do anything except get out of the way and let the task run. Does anyone know if they're using a different scheduler? A different timer frequency (CONFIG_HZ) maybe?

OpenBSD may be very secure but performance just sucks, perhaps because they are so late in getting real SMP support.

OpenBSD 5.9 should be much better. Seems like the next release is all about SMP: http://www.openbsd.org/plus.html