DragonFlyBSD 4.6 vs. Linux Benchmarks

With DragonFlyBSD 4.6 having been released this week, here are benchmarks comparing its performance to that of the previous DragonFlyBSD 4.4 release as well as seeing how it compares to some Linux distributions.

The DragonFlyBSD 4.6 release premiered with NVMe PCI-E solid state drive support, significantly improved SMP performance, improved i915 DRM Intel graphics support, initial EFI booting support, new packages, and other changes.

On an Intel Xeon E5 v3 Haswell system I did a clean stock install of DragonFlyBSD 4.6.0 and compared its out-of-the-box performance to DragonFlyBSD 4.4.3. In addition, on the same system its performance was compared to Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10 in its current development form, and Intel's Clear Linux 9710 distribution. All of the tests were done on the same system (on the system table the CPU frequency differences just come down to boost vs. base clock frequency reporting and other reporting differences).

DragonFlyBSD 4.6 ships with the GCC 5.3.1 compiler. All of the BSD/Linux distribution benchmarks carried out for this article were fully-automated using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The tests for this article are mainly focused on CPU performance and all tests are built from source for the respective platform using the out-of-the-box compiler and OS settings.