Slashdot Mirror
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.
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. "
Note that this is systems benchmark, not a VM one.
There are a lot more different things in the two
kernels, than the VM. And note, that the server was
SMP, an area where FreeBSD folks admit "Linux is a
year ahead". It may turn out in the end that
actually the FreeBSD VM performs better, making
able the Big Lock BSD kernel catch up with more
fine graned Linux .
-velco
Lies, damned lies, statistics
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).