Eight-Way BSD & Linux OS Comparison

Being benchmarked today at Phoronix is a comparison of eight different BSD and Linux operating systems. The contenders for this performance roundabout include PC-BSD 9.1, DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1, Ubuntu 13.04, Linux Mint 15 RC, CentOS 6.4, Fedora 18, Mageia 3, and openSUSE 12.3. Which of these operating systems are the fastest and slowest for a variety of different workloads? Read on to find out.

For running a comprehensive comparison of several different Linux/BSD distributions, over the past few weeks I loaded up the latest releases of many different operating systems all on the same system to compare its performance. The test system used for this comparison was the Sandy Bridge EE system with an Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition CPU, 8GB of RAM, AMD Radeon HD 4650 graphics, and an OCZ Vertex SSD. For each operating system, the stock packages/settings were used without any operating system customizations to offer an "out of the box" look at each operating system in a standard and reproducible way.

Benchmarking of the eight different BSD and Linux platforms was handled in a fully automated and turnkey manner using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.

Any questions about the test configuration and other feedback can be directed to the forums and Twitter. Requests for testing additional operating systems to build upon today's results can be made through those mediums.