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FreeBSD 7.0 Bests Linux In SMP Performance
cecom writes "After major improvements in SMP support in FreeBSD 7.0, benchmarks show it performing 15% better than the latest Linux kernels (PDF, see slides 17 to 19) on 8 CPUs under PostgreSQL and MySQL. While a couple of benchmarks are not conclusive evidence, it can be assumed that FreeBSD will once again be a serious performance contender. Some posters on LWN have noted that the level of Linux performance could be related to the Completely Fair Scheduler, which was merged into the 2.6.23 Linux kernel."
Update: 03/06 21:32 GMT by KD : An anonymous reader sent in word that Linux kernel developer Nick Piggin reran the benchmark today and came to a different conclusion: In his benchmark Linux was faster than FreeBSD.
The beastie is not evil! Just because he has horns, a pitchfork and looks like the devil doesn't make him evil!
... does it ...
You can tell by his smile. It doesn't look freakish or anything
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
There are FreeBSD-based PC-BSD and DesktopBSD Both of them are using KDE, though.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/650739
You could try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, though this is not really a distribution of the full FreeBSD system but just its kernel with a GNU userland.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Cool, however it would be better if software working on Linux were also working on FreeBSD.
boehm-gc is totally broken when using threads on FreeBSD SMP. And it's still totally broken on FreeBSD 7.
The Neko virtual machine is in ports, but it's unuseable due to this, I don't even understand why it's in the ports tree. Was it ever tested before being imported?
Just creating a thread:
$loader.loadprim("std@thread_create", 2)(function(z) { $print(z) }, "OK");
makes is crash with a corrupted stack. It works on every other operating system. It seems to work on an UP FreeBSD system, but on a FreeBSD 7 SMP system, it crashes, crashes, crashes.
{{.sig}}
Hi, I am the one who performed these benchmarks and I'd like to clarify a couple of things:
:-)
* The point of this benchmark is not to unilaterally declare victory over Linux, but to point out that FreeBSD is once again competitive with it on modern high-end hardware and certain workloads. Of course, we are working on other workloads too, and currently perform better than Linux on other benchmarks, and still worse on others. There will no doubt be further friendly competition between the two OSes that will work to the benefit of both. Our message to the Linux developers is that they should not expect to get away with resting on their laurels
* I benchmarked both mysql and postgresql, and FreeBSD 7.0 performs better than all Linux kernels (at least up to 2.6.23) with both databases. Incidentally postgresql is much faster than mysql, contradicting common wisdom. Other fun facts are that mysql 5.0.51 has poorer scaling than 5.0.47, and 5.1.x has *much* worse performance and scaling than 5.0.47 on my tests.
* I benchmarked several versions of Linux including 2.6.20.x, 2.6.22 and 2.6.23. 2.6.20.x has terrible performance http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/scaling.png. This graph is from Feb 2007 and the FreeBSD performance also improved after this point.
* 2.6.22 (which is pre-CFS) mostly fixed this but still performs worse than FreeBSD http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/os-mysql.png. 2.6.23 included the new scheduler and was a major performance regression. I did not yet retest with 2.6.24, so maybe they have fixed CFS by now.
* Contrary to some commenter's assertions that this is not a CPU benchmark, this benchmark is *extremely* sensitive to CPU performance and especially scheduling (in fact, as noted in the PDF, I/O performance is not a factor here). The scheduler really matters here, which is why Linux took a big hit when they switched to CFS (similarly, on FreeBSD the 4BSD scheduler performs much worse). Tuning the scheduler is critical to performance on this kind of workload. The other critical aspect is having a highly optimized kernel without concurrency bottlenecks. 2.6.20 fell over on kernel concurrency, and 2.6.23 fell over with the scheduler.
Hope this helps to clarify things.
Looks like it didn't last for long:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/npiggin/sysbench/
I would say that packages != programs.
With a debian "package", I know exactly how to install it (the same way as all the others), and I know that there is a set version of that package that corresponds to, say, "Debian Sarge". I know that if I install it, it will pull along any libraries it needs, and that it won't break anything already on my system. I know it doesn't always work like that, but that's the idea. I think of a "package" as part of the distribution. Somebody has decided that it forms part of the distribution, and has hopefully tested it as such.
A "program" is what Windows has so many of. But all bets are off when it comes to versioning, library dependencies, etc. Even how to install it. If you think of Windows as a "distribution", then it doesn't come with all that many packages at all. A Desktop environment, a browser, some photo and media tools. Mac OS X doesn't really fare all that much better. I love OS X to bits, but the first thing I did was install a third party program (firefox).
http://desktopbsd.net/wiki/doku.php?id=doc:faqs
Of course, I appreciate the fact that FreeBSD's base is an integrated system which is maintained as a unit as opposed to Linux distributions which are sourced from multiple projects.
The article also describes a FreeBSD 7.0 pre-release from October last year. This still had debugging code turned on in the builds, as mentioned on the NetBSD lists when Andrew Doran was comparing NetBSD -current SMP performance.
I did this once. Your mod points are undone and lost.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org