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Byte: FreeBSD vs Linux Revisited
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.
"As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth."
In particular, be sure to read the very bottom of the article:
Before you fire up your e-mail program to contest the results or suggest some neat trick to get even more out of either the Linux benchmark server or the FreeBSD server, remember what I said at the beginning of this review: This was not a scientific benchmark in a professional benchmarking lab. All results are only valid within my own environment and you are certainly bound to see a different result on your machines. The benchmark was only about finding out how well Linux handles stress loads compared to FreeBSD, and I do not claim that one OS is better than the other one.
These aren't scientific. These are the results one person sees - and also note that the various problems presented to the servers give different results. FreeBSD and Linux both had strengths and weaknesses even in his tests.
the daemon's in the details, too.
(shurg) Very nice and interesting article anyone else care to verify or dispute the findings?
And a serious question; does linux and bsd scale well across various architectures?
I suppose if people get riled up about any comparison maybe there should be a catagory such as "from the benchmark or skidmark dept."
Heh.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
This is good.
Not to flame or troll.... but......
How come Debian has such a PITA installer? Mandrake was nice, however, OpenBSD and FreeBSD have mega-top notch installers. Easy to use, easy to configure, just say "go".
I've tried Debian three or four times before giving up... 2 years ago... about a year ago and last week...
Downloading the ISO for FreeBSD 4.4 was the hardest thing I did with that. (Still can't quite get my Linksys WPC11 card to talk to my AP but that's a different issue).
I was talking out of personal experience. FreeBSD has always seemed to run much more stable for a server. Also I love the security on FreeBSD. Not to mention the ease of installing new apps from the ports directory. That's just freakin genius. I have alot of friends that run FreeBSD for their desktops, I'm just still a fan of linux there. I guess it's backwards from what normal people feel, but the server environments that I've built just have me feeling this way... Maybe it's just all the code red and old pizza I just downed...
Um, this is my sig.
MAXUSERS was set to 20!!
Jeez, I won't even set it that low for my personal machine. For the purposes of this kind of benchmark, I would have at least started with 128. If you want to be fair in I/O benchmarks, have BOTH machines mount the filesystems asynch. If you're going to do a comparison, at least compare apples to apples. Softupdates rocks, but I still think async is going to be faster.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The NICs were a mix of Alteon and Intel Gigabit for the clients.
If he's using the Gigaswitch I think he's using, it takes two Gigabit Fiber Modules that each provide two 1000BaseSX ports. He's ignoring the twenty-four 10/100 ports and running a network on the backbone, as it were.
Not that it matters to a magazine columnist who has a Proliant to play with, but this is a little more expensive than 1000BaseTX, isn't it?
I really think this is the kind of way that OSS could win out in the end over closed proprietary software. When one OSS group does somethign innovative, new, etc, the other guys will either try to "one-up them" (disregard the reasons here) or say to them "hey, that's a great idea, mind if we implement it here?" Basically OSS development just keeps going with thousands of programmers each contributing what they know. Isn't this a major point of OSS anyway? Not to flat out "beat the commercial competition" but rather to develop the best software possible with the help of others? We have multiple OpenSource operating systems, and we have healthy competition in them (something the commercial market is currently lacking). As long as one side keeps innovating (must...refrain...), development will make leaps and bounds as the competition tries to improve upon the other to "better their market share".
--MonMotha
OK, the more important question these days is which OS (or even distribution) is better for colocated machines? I'm looking at it from the perspective that my machine would be many hundreds of miles away and I don't intend to go drive to sit at the console to do an upgrade. What would be my choices? I believe FreeBSD supposedly is strongly suited to that type of environment but it looks like Debian GNU/Linux also has strong points there as well.
Any response to a question like this is bound to upset someone. I'll /dev/null.
answer with the caveat that this is my opinion that developed over the
past three years following them both as well as other commercial OSs.
Those of you offended in any way by this, please cat flames >
That said -- the differences between FreeBSD and Linux can best be
understood in the context of American politics. There are essentially two
philosophies: Republican (FreeBSD) and Democrat (Linux).
The FreeBSD organization is a republican structure -- we have our say as
users, but the final decisions devolve to the core team who take the final
responsibility for their decisions. FreeBSD takes a conservative approach.
In other words, better things should work correctly at the expense of a
minorities desires, than to please all of the people all of the time and
have unexpected components of the OS breaking on a regular basis. We are
free to vote our approval or disapproval by changing our OS.
Linux is a democratic group. There is no single authority to accept final
responsibility except for Linus as it relates to the kernel. Linux adopted
early on a consensus approach (POSIX, etc.). In a sense, Linux is much
like current Democratic politics -- the mob pretty much rules. The end
result is that there is really no such thing as Linux -- there are
distributions that use the Linux kernel and from then on you have
essentially different operating systems. Slackware, for example, doesn't
look at all like Red Hat. Describing Linux is much like describing Mach.
(There isn't much - both are just micro kernels. _Anything_ can be
implemented over them.)
So as I see it, it comes down to this: vote for the philosophy that
appeals to you. I use FreeBSD because I rely on my machine for many other
uses besides tinkering with operating systems. FreeBSD doesn't change the
world on me every 6 months. Linux is in constant change. New things are
showing up all the time. If you like tinkering with operating systems and
having things that used to work break, Linux may be your answer. If you
don't know Unix -- pick one and get started. You'll learn how to pick the
best choice. No matter which one you pick, it will be infinitely better
that Micros**t anything.
not necessarily. if you read all the threads on that article, you see that the poster didn't go to too much effort before making that declaration. he couldn't saturate a 10MB/s locally, so he obviusly has some things configured wrong. instead of trying to tweak some settings, he blamed it on linux. freebsd out of the box must work great for his setup while debian didn't. i have debian on two boxes here and see nothing of the like; my transfer rates are fine.
I run both (slack-8/2.4.14 and FBSD 4.4) on my workstation. I find FreeBSD way easier to manage and generally have better performance, more pleasant to administer.
Support of "important" hardware is about the same.
My USB printer and scanner function well in both, for example.
Support of more exotic hardware still is more problematic in FreeBSD: No 3D graphics on nvidia because nvidia's driver has not been ported to FBSD yet. My DVB-S (satellite card) is not supported in FBSD, in Linux I can use it to watch and digitally record programs. DV-video through Firewire doesn't work in FBSD. I don't know whether Linux does any better (I think so) because I switch to Windows to capture and process video.
For software (except 3D games as mentioned) FreeBSD has somewhat less native software, but almost everything (even including VMWare for Linux) runs extremely well under the Linux emulator, often even surpassing the speed when run natively under Linux (this is possible since technically it is not really emulation, but all Linux system calls have been added via a loadable kernel module).
The FreeBSD kernel is able to run Linux binaries, once you have installed the Linux emulation port (it adds a kernel module that is able to work with Linux ABI binaries plus stores a couple of system libs compiled for Linux - so it is rather a different operation mode than an emulation).
Quake3 Arena for example works under FreeBSD just fine.
Where there is a problem is the support of acclerated graphics drivers. Where such a driver is open source, it has been ported to FreeBSD (Matrox drivers, the rather slow nvidia driver for XFree86 3.3.x series, ..).
Where there is only a binary driver, and most unfortunately, this is the case for the fast nvidia drivers, this has yielded no results yet.
The problem is that while the nvidia binary driver might work in theory on all x86 plattforms, with just a different kernel interfacing (for which the source exists), in reality it does only run with certain Linux kernels. Here is a report that goes into details.
Regards,
Marc