DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Ubuntu 20.04 On Intel's Core i9 10900K Comet Lake

One of the areas where Intel has the leg up over AMD when it comes to open-source software support is on the BSD side where generally the likes of FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD often exhibit better out-of-the-box support at launch. Here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD are running on the Core i9 10900K "Comet Lake" processor with Z490 motherboard.

Tested for this article were the Core i9 10900K at stock speeds with the Gigabyte Z490 AORUS MASTER motherboard. The BSD candidates for this testing were FreeBSD 12.1 and DragonFlyBSD 5.8.1 as the latest stable releases for these two BSDs. Long story short, the support experience for this latest-generation Intel desktop platform was smooth: the only exception was the Ethernet not working out of the box, but that isn't surprising considering even on the Linux side 5.6 or newer is needed. But once plugging in a USB Ethernet adapter, it was off to the races in running DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD on this i9-10900K box.

Besides the Ethernet support for the Intel 2.5GbE chip not working out-of-the-box on the stable releases, the rest of the platform support was in good standing.

FreeBSD 12.1 was benchmarked with both its default LLVM Clang 8.0.1 compiler and then again with GCC 9.3. DragonFlyBSD 5.8.1 was tested with both its default GCC 8.3 compiler and then again with GCC 9.3. Given that FreeBSD was running with ZFS and DragonFlyBSD with HAMMER2, when it came to the Ubuntu 20.04 testing for comparison, it was installed using its OpenZFS root file-system support.

No other changes were made to the software or hardware configuration during the testing process. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various BSD vs. Linux benchmarks were run for getting an idea as to the performance of FreeBSD 12.1 and DragonFlyBSD 5.8.1 on Intel Comet Lake relative to Ubuntu Linux.