How Three BSD Operating Systems Compare To Ten Linux Distributions

Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.

If you didn't read that earlier article, you should, but the distributions tested were:

Antergos 2015.12 - The latest rolling release of this Arch-based Linux distribution with the Linux 4.3 kernel, GCC 5.3, and an EXT4 file-system.

CentOS 7 1511 - The RHEL7-derived distribution with the Linux 3.10 kernel, GCC 4.8.5, and an XFS file-system by default.

Clear Linux 5700 - The latest release of Intel's relatively new Linux distribution. Clear Linux 5700 was using the Linux 4.3 kernel, GCC 5.3.0, and the EXT4 file-system.

Debian Linux 8.2 - The latest Debian stable release with the Linux 3.16 kernel, GCC 4.9.2, and an EXT4 file-system.

Debian Stretch/Testing - The Linux 4.3 kernel, GCC 5.3.1, and an EXT4 file-system.

Fedora 23 - Fedora 23 currently has the Linux 4.2 kernel, GCC 5.3.1, and an EXT4 file-system.

OpenSUSE Linux 42.1 - The Linux 4.1 kernel, GCC 4.8.5, and an XFS file-system was in use for the default location of the Phoronix Test Suite.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - OpenSUSE's rolling release with Linux 4.3, GCC 5.1, and an XFS file-system.

Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS - The Linux 3.19 kernel, GCC 4.8.4, and EXT4.

Ubuntu 15.10 - The Linux 4.2 kernel, GCC 5.2.1, and EXT4.

For some BSD coverage on that same system were clean installed, out-of-the-box tests of:

DragonFlyBSD 4.4.1 - The latest DragonFly release with GCC 5.2.1 and the HAMMER file-system.

OpenBSD 5.8 - OpenBSD 5.8 with GCC 4.2.1 as the default compiler and FFS file-system.

PC-BSD 10.2 - Derived off FreeBSD 10.2, the defaults were the Clang 3.4.1 compiler and ZFS file-system.

The same system comprised of an Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 processor, 16GB of DDR3-1600MHz memory, Gigabyte H81M-S1 motherboard, Radeon HD 4550, and 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD were used for this benchmarking.

All of these out-of-the-box benchmarks were done using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Compared to the 10-way Linux comparison earlier this week, a subset of those results were used for this BSD vs. Linux benchmarking due to not all of the tests being compatible with BSD, time constraints, and some out-of-the-box/upstream build problems with others. The tests are mainly focused on file-system and CPU performance.