Running Some Fresh BSD vs. Linux Benchmarks

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 10.2 and NetBSD 7.0, plus the H2'2015 Linux distribution updates rolling around, I've just started work on a new BSD vs. Linux operating system performance comparison.

First up are the BSD distributions for testing... The test system being used for this comparison is an Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 Haswell-E plus AMD FirePro system. Given the new release of NetBSD 7.0, I decided to try that out first.

Unfortunately, that didn't go over well. When trying the USB-based installation as well as an install from the ISO on a CD, in both instances the boot process simply hung indefinitely on the root device. With neither installer medium working out on the system and not having too much time to debug, it was just moving onto the next BSD OS: DragonFlyBSD 4.2.

This latest release of DragonFlyBSD 4.2 installed fine on this Haswell Xeon system with solid-state drive. No problems at all in getting the installer started and booting the new installation.

While I was excited to try out the Radeon kernel mode-setting support of DFly 4.2 as well as its new KMS console, sadly, it failed. When loading the radeonkms kernel module, I no longer had a display. I assume this is either due to the Linux-ported Radeon DRM driver not yet properly handling DisplayPort monitors or some other support issue with this Cayman GPU found on this FirePro graphics card. So for saving time, just dropped those ambitions of using the new DragonFly Radeon KMS driver and just focusing on some server benchmarks.

So far those DragonFlyBSD 4.2 tests are going well on the Xeon system. Next up is then FreeBSD 10.2 followed by various Linux distributions.

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