Benchmarking Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD

Of the 27 tests that were carried out with our first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarking session, in 18 of the tests Debian GNU/Linux 32-bit was faster than Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 32-bit. However, with many of those 18 wins, the GNU/kFreeBSD results were very close to the GNU/Linux numbers. With the 64-bit versions, Debian GNU/Linux did even better and was in front 23 of the 27 times compared to 64-bit Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. These 64-bit results were certainly quite interesting and it looks like the FreeBSD kernel can be better tuned for a 64-bit environment. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 64-bit though did have strong advantages with the x264, 7-Zip, and Gcrypt CEMLLIA256-ECB Cipher tests over the Linux kernel.

Some of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD losses were in the area of disk performance where the common UFS file-system was outdone by EXT3, which is currently the default choice for Debian GNU/Linux. The results may have shaken out differently had the ZFS file-system been used, but unfortunately that is not a viable option at this point with the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project, and if EXT4 was the default for Debian GNU/Linux it would also be interesting.

This though is just our first set of benchmarks of GNU/kFreeBSD and we will be back with more tests shortly, including other operating systems that we will be tossing into the testing mix. Results with OpenSolaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD (both 7.2 and 8.0), and Fedora added in will be published next week. For those interested in more of our operating system benchmarks, we have benchmarked FreeBSD 8.0 against Linux and OpenSolaris, compared Mac OS X 10.6 to Ubuntu 9.10, and many other FreeBSD benchmarks. You can run your own tests freely using the Phoronix Test Suite on Linux, OpenSolaris, *BSD, and Mac OS X operating systems along with emerging support for Microsoft Windows.