TrueOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD & DragonFlyBSD Against Linux + Windows 10 Benchmarks

Last week I posted benchmarks of a big Linux distribution and Windows 10 / WSL benchmark comparison while in this article for kicking off the Phoronix birthday benchmarking week are results when seeing how the various BSDs are comparing against the Linux distributions and Windows 10 Pro itself. The BSDs for this comparison were TrueOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFlyBSD.

The BSDs that were benchmarked for this comparison included FreeBSD 11.1, FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3, FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1, DragonFlyBSD 5.3 development (given their recent performance optimizations), and OpenBSD 5.3. Notably left out was NetBSD as it was yielding a segmentation fault when booting on the system used for testing.

All of the BSD/Linux/Windows operating systems for this comparison were run from the same system, which was comprised of an Intel Core i9 7980XE, ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB DDR4 memory, 256GB Intel 760p NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card.

The Linux operating systems for testing included:

Antergos 18.5-Rolling - This Arch-based Linux distribution is riding with the Linux 4.16 kernel, Mesa 18.04, GCC 8.1.0, and uses an EXT4 file-system by default.

CentOS Linux 7 - The latest CentOS release based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5. Its stack includes Linux 3.10, Mesa 17.2.3, GCC 4.8.5 as the default compiler, and uses an XFS file-system by default.

Clear Linux - Intel's rolling-release Linux distribution with the Linux 4.16 kernel, Mesa 18.2-dev, GCC 8.1.1, and an EXT4 file-system. Note that with the NVMe SSD storage, all of the Linux distributions were defaulting to "none" for the I/O scheduler except Clear Linux as well as openSUSE Tumbleweed both defaulted to the MQ-DEADLINE configuration for this system. Clear Linux also defaults to the performance governor over powersave, ships with aggressively optimized CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS by default, and its packages are also optimized for performance, among other out-of-the-box tuning for delivering a performant Linux experience.

Debian 9.4 - The latest Debian Stretch stable release with Linux 4.9, Mesa 13.0, and GCC 6.3.0, and EXT4 file-system.

Debian Testing - The current testing/development release of what will become Debian 10 Buster next year. At this stage Debian Testing has the Linux 4.16 kernel, Mesa 18.0, GCC 7.3.0, and EXT4 by default.

Fedora Workstation 28 - With updates, Fedora 28 is up to the Linux 4.16.11, Mesa 18.0, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4 by default for its Workstation spin.

Manjaro 17.1.10 - The other popular Arch-based Linux distribution was tested and it's currently shipping the Linux 4.14 kernel, Mesa 18.0.4, and GCC 8.1.0 with EXT4.

OpenMandriva 3.03 - The current OpenMandriva Linux stack includes the 4.13 kernel, KDE Plasma 5.10.5, Mesa 17.2.3, and GCC 7.3.0.

Sabayon Linux 18.5 - The popular Gentoo-based Linux distribution with the 4.14 kernel, NVIDIA 390.42 by default, and GCC 6.4.0 compiler.

Solus 3.9999 - The updated Solus 3 Linux distribution ahead of Solus 4 provides the Linux 4.16 kernel, Mesa 18.1.0, and GCC 7.3.0 compiler atop EXT4.

Ubuntu 18.04 - The Bionic Beaver LTS release has the Linux 4.15 kernel, Mesa 18.0, GCC 7.3.0, and EXT4 by default.

openSUSE Leap 15 - The newly-released openSUSE Leap 15.0 derived from the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 code-base. This means the Linux 4.12 kernel, Mesa 18.0, GCC 7.3.1, and a root Btrfs file-system but XFS for the home partition where tests occur.

openSUSE Tumbleweed - The rolling-release version of openSUSE has the Linux 4.16 kernel, Mesa 18.1.0, and the same file-system configuration. As stated above, Tumbleweed on this system defaults to mq-deadline rather than none for its I/O scheduler.

There was also Windows 10 as of the recent April 2018 update. Microsoft Windows 10 itself running for the supported native test cases with Build 17134 and NTFS file-system. The WSL results were removed from this article, see the earlier tests if you are interested in the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The BSD tests included:

DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 - The latest stable release of DragonFly including the GCC 5.4.1 compiler and using the new HAMMER2 file-system.

DragonFlyBSD 5.3 - The latest daily images of DragonFlyBSD 5.3 development for DragonFlyBSD 5.4 are still defaulting to GCC 5.4.1 and was tested with the HAMMER2 file-system.

FreeBSD 11.1 - The latest stable release of FreeBSD and uses the Clang 4.0 compiler by default and was tested with the ZFS file-system.

FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3 - The latest development release of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.2 stable update. This was tested with ZFS and again Clang 6.0 was the stock compiler.

FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT - The most recent CURRENT release that was also using the LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler by default and using ZFS.

OpenBSD 6.3 - The current OpenBSD release with the GCC 4.2.1 compiler by default though also has Clang 5.0.1. The FFS file-system was at play.

TrueOS 18.03 - The current stable release based upon FreeBSD and formerly known as PC-BSD. TrueOS 18.03 is based on FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT and has the LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler and defaults to ZFS.

All of these Linux, Windows, and BSD operating system tests were cleanly installed on the i9-7980XE test system and using all of the reasonable defaults set by each of the OS vendors for benchmarking. The benchmarks were run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.