Intel Core i9 10980XE: FreeBSD 12.1 vs. GhostBSD 12.02 vs. DragonFlyBSD vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks

Given the release earlier this month of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 along with the recent debut of the FreeBSD-based desktop-focused GhostBSD 20.02, here are benchmarks looking at their performance up against FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE as well as the current state of Ubuntu 20.04. Tests were done both with the LLVM Clang and GCC compilers.

The operating systems tested for this comparison included:

GhostBSD 20.02 - The FreeBSD-based desktop-focused OS currenly based on FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE. With its default compiler, like FreeBSD 12.1 upstream, is using LLVM Clang 9.0.1. The ZFS file-system is used by default.

GhostBSD 20.02 + GCC9 - A second run of GhostBSD 20.02 but switching over to the GCC 9.2.0 compiler available as well for aligning with the GCC default on most Linux distributions.

DragonFlyBSD 5.8 - The latest stable release of DragonFlyBSD as of earlier this month. By default DragonFlyBSD 5.8 uses the GCC 8.3 compiler. The HAMMER2 file-system was in use.

DragonFlyBSD 5.8 + GCC9 - A second run of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 when upgrading to the GCC 9.2 compiler available via pkg.

FreeBSD 12.1 - The current FreeBSD stable release with ZFS. By default using LLVM Clang 9.0.1.

FreeBSD 12.1 + GCC9 - A second run of FreeBSD 12.1 after moving to GCC 9.2.0 via pkg.

Ubuntu 20.04 - The current development snapshot of the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the Linux 5.4 kernel. By default the EXT4 file-system is used with the GCC 9.3 compiler.

Ubuntu 20.04 + ZFS - Re-installing Ubuntu 20.04 but making use of its ZFS/ZoL root file-system option in order to match the FreeBSD ZFS setups at play.

All of this testing was done on the same system featuring an Intel Core i9 10980XE, 32GB (4 x 8GB DDR4-3200) memory, Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics. All system settings on all of the operating systems under test were at their defaults unless otherwise noted.

Originally the plan was also to test a second system with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X or 3990X, but ran into issues with DragonFlyBSD 5.8 that appear to stem from the motherboard's USB support, but at least the Intel Core i9 system was working without issue on all of the BSDs and Linux distributions we have tested.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were carried out.