How Three BSD Operating Systems Compare To Ten Linux Distributions

DragonFlyBSD failed to run the LAME MP3, but OpenBSD 5.8 did so this time, except it was in last place. PC-BSD 10.2 meanwhile was performing right in line with the other Linux distributions.

Lastly for this short BSD vs. Linux distribution comparison was a simple LZMA compression test. PC-BSD 10.2 was performing right in line with the highest-performing Linux distributions while OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD 4.4.1 were a little bit slower and pulling in just ahead of the slowest Linux distribution, Debian 8.2.

The results were fun from this single system powered by an Intel Xeon Haswell processor with SSD storage. The results available show PC-BSD 10.2 with the ZFS file-system doing very well against the EXT4/ZFS Linux contenders for most of the disk tests. When it comes to the processor-focused tests, PC-BSD 10.2 with its default LLVM Clang compiler was doing well except for the tests where Clang is known to come up short of GCC. Overall, PC-BSD did quite well in these benchmarks against Linux. DragonFlyBSD was also doing well for the tests it ran while of the three distributions tested, OpenBSD 5.8 tended to fall behind.

If there is enough interest from Phoronix Premium members, I may run a similar BSD vs. Linux comparison on more systems and with a greater set of compatible tests. Let me know your feedback and suggestions via the Phoronix Forums. Thanks to those supporting Phoronix to make all of this open-source hardware testing possible.