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Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition
BenchmarkingFreak writes "OSnews is running a story about a new benchmarking competition: OSU Open Source Lab wanted to take the concept of benchmarking a little bit further with the Beaver Challenge 2004. In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance. And they are running it all on wicked machines, just imagine... well you know."
This is a really neat idea, and it's a long time coming; however, I wouldn't expect overly divergent results among Linux distributions. Afterall, they're all going to use the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and comparable glibc versions(with maybe the exception of Debian), so the only speed difference should be in the compiler flags used to build the packages. I'm not trying to negate the coolness of this competition because it should give a good measure of performance between the BSD distros VS Linux distros, but don't be surprised when the Linux distros all show comparable results. As a footnote, I do expect Gentoo to come in the lead of the Linux distros having tried them all and found it the fastest in empircal testing...
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
Does "not final" and "if people want to ante in to try this with their favorite distro" mean nothing to you?
Too bad Gentoo isn't the only one with a PORTS clone.
;-)
Ever looked at Crux, Arch, or if you want "the original", BSD?
Gentoo isn't very unique in respect to portage.
Define "friendly." FreeBSD has some of the best documentation I've seen anywhere, a more than supportive community and has the same GUIs that Linux does. Once you've set it up (the installer is curses based, but makes a LOT more sense than most point&click Linux installers), it's no more difficult to use than any Linux distribution. Come on, you've got more sense than to say this.
The World is Yours.
No way would Microsoft back another duel like that!
And in fact, as other responders have pointed out, they now have text in the EULA preventing you from backing that same duel.
Shows they have a lot of faith in their products.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I see 6 linux distributions and 3 BSDs.
You do realize that there are OTHER operating systems out there, right?
You would think that the difference between the linux distros would be trivial at best, with the exception of gentoo. Why 6?
Isn't there a free beos out there now?
Interesting. That's not the reason for disabling HyperThreading that I've heard. I often hear people say it should be disabled unless you have a scheduler that supports HyperThreading well. There are lots of opportunities to go wrong when scheduling tasks on HT-enabled CPUs.
For example, if you have one real processor and are running a high-priority task and a low-priority task, the low-priority task will get 50% of the processor time with a non-HT aware scheduler, since it says "well, I've got this processor free, so I might as well use it" when that's not really true. This problem is discussed more here.
Similarly, if you've got several high-performance tasks and several real processors, you want to spread them out across as many real processors as possible to maximize parallelism.
on that fast of a machine?!?! lay off the crack ..
.. im pretty sure these machines can do it in half the time or better.
if an athlon 2500xp can do a stage 1 install up to gnome desktop in about 12 hours