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Byte: FreeBSD vs Linux Revisited

Posted by michael on from the no-holds-barred dept.

Beerwolff writes: "This time I have remembered the link to the Byte article that's a follow-up to two of Moshe Bar's previous articles comparing FreeBSD and Linux--This time with the new Linux VM. His Apache "results show that Linux is better at handling I/O cache than FreeBSD, and that FreeBSD is more efficient at building up and tearing down processes."" As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth.

8 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. The right tool for the right job. by thetechweenie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Regardsless of what some reviewer comes up with, I have just found that they each do something specific. For servers, I would run FreeBSD. All of the daemons are ported, and the security is great. For my desktop, it's linux all the way. I think this is comparing apples to oranges.

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    Um, this is my sig.
    1. Re:The right tool for the right job. by cymen · · Score: 2, Informative

      And the same holds true for GNU/Linux.

      What would be awesome would be a linux distrib that has the same ease of upgrading that is possible with freebsd. Basically my /usr/src is a cvs checkout of the 4.4-STABLE cvs tree. I can update it when I want to via cvsup to the FreeBSD cvsup mirrors. /usr/src contains the kernel and userland. It is really nice in terms of upgrading and it is possible to go from 4.4 to 4.5 and up with relative ease compared to getting out the ISO images on most other linux distribs. Debian comes close to this but in a much different way that is very top heavy in terms of people assembling packages, etc. I much prefer having ports and cvsup...

  2. Linux Vs BSD by dsinner · · Score: 2, Informative

    With all the media/capital hype surrounding linux right now, BSD doesn't stand a chance. Everywhere I go on the net I see linux cluster this, linux PDAs, linux games, linux servers, linux everything..

    I'm waiting for the linux powered toilet brush, personally. I'd just hope that these people who are pumping their servers full of linux goodness don't do it just because the hype is there, they really need to get more information BOTH BSD & Linux, besides benchmarks with sendmail and what not.

    Linux is not the only Microsoft alternative.

  3. Uh huh, and how is this different for ports? by Dast · · Score: 3, Informative

    Debian comes close to this but in a much different way that is very top heavy in terms of people assembling packages, etc.

    Care to go into detail on this, and exactly how it is top heavy compared to people having to maintain ports or system source? That stuff doesn't magically appear and keep itself fixed.

    FreeBSD people can talk all they want about how easy it is to keep their stuff up to date, but frankly, it doesn't compare to apt-get in the ease of use department, not to mention the speed department on my crappy p100 NAT box that takes *forever* to cvsup and recompile a shit load of source. Course, on a beefy box that is less of a problem.

    I like FreeBSD, but after using Debian, I wonder why I ever tolerated spending so much time updating my OS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or otherwise.

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    This sig is false.

  4. Re:Holy bat guano by brass1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    MAXUSERS was set to 20!!

    Which explains the awful IO cache[sic] performance seen during this "benchmark". According to my math, the author set aside nearly 17K of RAM for mbufs. This will materially effect network and file IO performance. Honestly, I'm impressed the system actually stayed up under load with this stupid of a setting.

    Oh.. and LINT has a maxusers setting on 10 (plus a comment about not using LINT to build a kernel). GENERIC's is 32. Considering what this guy's bio says and the end of the story, I have a hard time believing this is really is an honest mistake.

  5. Re:Been having this debate with a friend of mine.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You can do journalling with RAID in FreeBSD 4.4. Just turn on soft-updates when you newfs on your RAID.

  6. *Your* Opinion? (-1, Cut-And-Paste) by Rabenwolf · · Score: 4, Informative
    Well, had this really been your opinion, you wouldn't have needed to copy it from elsewhere on the web, would you?

    Please karmawhore with your own material if you have to.

  7. Re:My opinion... take it or leave it. by wobblie · · Score: 2, Informative

    No your analogy is ridiculous, since you're not comparing kinds. Not to mention there is no real difference between the republicans and democrats.
    Republicans and Democrats is more like comparing Windows 98 and Windows ME. Neither works worth a shit.

    Linux is a kernel, FreeBSD is a distribution. You can compare the BSD kernel with linux, or FreeBSD with Debian or Mandrake, but you can't compare OpenBSD with linux, any more than you can compare W2K with linux (unless you're just comparing kernels).

    This Byte article is comparing the bsd kernel with linux.