FreeBSD 12.0 vs. DragonFlyBSD 5.4 vs. TrueOS 18.12 vs. Linux On A Tyan EPYC Server

Similar to our previous round of benchmarks, the latest FreeBSD performs shockingly well for the Himeno pressure solver that puts it well ahead of the older FreeBSD release, DragonFlyBSD 5.4, and the Linux distributions. This does appear to be a kernel-related change with the compiler difference in going from FreeBSD 11.2 to 12.0 just being the Clang 6.0.1 point release.

With the Stockfish chess benchmark, the BSDs were only narrowly behind the Linux distributions while the mature CentOS 7 pulled off a first place finish over Ubuntu and Clear Linux.

CentOS 7 with its old GCC 4.8 compiler yielded the fastest compile times for PHP, even better than FreeBSD with Clang that is generally quite fast at compiling compared to GCC. But the aging GCC 4.8 lacks many of the optimization passes of newer compilers and thus better build times.

The GCC-based operating systems were the fastest with the C-Ray ray-tracer.

With Primesieve, the compatible Linux distributions were noticeably faster.

FreeBSD was performing fairly well with the Node.js benchmarks.