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NetBSD 2.0 vs FreeBSD 5.3 Benchmarks
diegocgteleline.es writes "According to OSnews, Gregory McGarry benchmarked NetBSD 2.0 against FreeBSD 5.3 and found that NetBSD 2.0 surpasses FreeBSD 5.3 in most of benchmarks. The machine used for benchmarks is a 3 Ghz P4 so it doesn't reflect the improvements of FreeBSD 5.3 in the SMP arena, which is where their developers have put their efforts in the last years and where NetBSD is still using a "big-lock" model. Newsforge is also carrying a interview with some NetBSD developers about the technology behind NetBSD 2.0."
FreeBSD's focus is typically on overall throughput of massive server, with responsetime as a tradeoff, while this benchmark with all of its timings of single OS operations is more something realtimish?
If NetBSD aspires to be a RT focussed distro/OS, they'd better have benchmarked it against some Linux with RT patches?
As an OS junky, I have used both of these BSDs, and am very impressed with them. I use FreeBSD on my P4 3GHz laptop, as Project Evil lets me use the WiFi card nicely, and ACPI kind of works. I use NetBSD on my Sparc Station 5 and my Athlon desktop, and I have found both to be wonderful for desktop use and as servers. I salute both of the groups of people who make these OSes, and wish that I had more time to contribute.
no.
in freebsd (I know this for a fact, I've gotton burned by it before) - if you compile a kernel for SMP, its NOT like linux in that it will fallback to UNIprocessing. it does NOT fallback! it hangs!
when moving an SMP custom compiled kernel to a non-smp box, you MUST rebuild the kernel or boot from an alternate non-smp kernel.
that sucks - but that's how it is. at least it is when I move a p6-built kernel from my dual xeon box to my single k8 box. both DO accept p6 as the ARCH type but the SMP code just causes a lockup upon boot.
(been running freebsd at home and at work for about 3 yrs now; and linux for about 10)
fyi
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Hyperthreading is *NOT* SMP! It is a single CPU that can only do the work of a single CPU. It pretends to be two CPUs but it is not. If you were talking about multiple core CPUs, then you would be right, but p4 HTT processors are single core.
Treating HTT at SMP is, to quote from the FreeBSD Handbook, "naive". Intel agrees, though they don't use that word. Here's a quote from the article you mentionL "but further performance gains can be realized by specifically tuning software for Hyper-Threading Technology." In other words, you tune software for HTT *differently* than you do for SMP.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Except that FGL isn't supported still on a good amount of hardware. Things as ubiquitous as a at keyboard, and last time I checked, the realtek 8139 network device give you the nice [GIANT LOCKED] message in dmesg.
If you have blessed hardware, you get better SMP support.
I will say that FreeBSD 5.x is better than 4.x in some areas (background fsck, smp on supported hardware, better threading support), however, as a total system, it's really not finished, and shouldn't have been released in its current state. Maybe Matt Dillon was right -- I don't know. But what they've put out isn't up-to-par quality-wise, when you compare it to 4.x.
NetBSD, on the other hand, really has come a long way with the 2.0 release. I would say that it's a better choice on i386 now than either FreeBSD 4 (which is deprecated, although there will be a 4.11 release), or FreeBSD 5. That they've gotten to that point is really a testiment to the amazing design work they do. It's a very good system that doesn't get enough attention.