Initial Benchmarks Of OpenBSD 6.4, DragonFlyBSD 5.3, FreeBSD vs. Linux
Given the recent release of OpenBSD 6.4, FreeBSD 12 now being in beta, and DragonFlyBSD 5.3 evolving nicely for what will eventually ship as DragonFlyBSD 5.4, here is the start of some fresh benchmarks between the BSDs and a few Linux distributions to see how the performance compares as we approach the end of 2018.
The Linux/BSD operating systems benchmarked for this article included:
DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 - The current stable DragonFlyBSD release with the GCC 5.4.1 compiler and HAMMER2 file-system.
DragonFlyBSD 5.3 20181029 - A daily snapshot of DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT. Among many kernel improvements, it's worthwhile to note that its default compiler is now GCC 8.1. The HAMMER2 file-system has also received a lot of continued optimization work ahead of DragonFlyBSD 5.4 stable.
FreeBSD 11.2 - The current stable FreeBSD 11 release with Clang 6.0 and using the ZFS file-system.
FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 2 - The latest development release of FreeBSD 12 with the Clang 6.0.1 compiler and ZFS file-system.
OpenBSD 6.4 - The newly-released OpenBSD release that is using the Clang 6.0 code compiler (and GCC 4.2.1 remains in base) and FFS file-system.
Clear Linux 26020 - The Intel rolling-release Linux distribution currently on the Linux 4.18.16 kernel, GCC 8.2.1, and defaulting to EXT4.
Fedora Server 29 - The newly-released Fedora 29 server spin with the Linux 4.18.16 kernel, GCC 8.2.1 compiler, and the server flavor defaults to the XFS file-system unlike Fedora Workstation 29 with EXT4.
Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS - The current Ubuntu LTS release with Linux 4.15, GCC 7.3, and EXT4.
All eight Linux/BSD operating systems were benchmarked on the same system. The hardware used for this comparison was the 36-thread Intel Core i9 7980XE running at its stock speeds and with Hyper Threading enabled, ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 4 x 4GB DDR4-3200 memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics card (though no graphics tests in this article), and a 240GB Corsair Force MP510 NVMe SSD.
All of these BSD and Linux benchmarks were run in a fully-automated and open manner using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking framework.