Benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux

An anonymous reader writes "The Debian Squeeze release is going to be accompanied by a first-rate kFreeBSD port and now early benchmarks of this port have started coming out using daily install images. The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project is marrying the FreeBSD kernel with a GNU userland and glibc while making most of the Debian repository packages available for kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. The first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks compare the performance of it to Debian GNU/Linux with the 2.6.30 kernel while the rest of the packages are the same. Results are shown for both i386 and x86_64 flavors. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD may be running well, but it has a lot of catching up to do in terms of speed against Linux."

Comments

Mod Article Flamebait

[TheRaven64]

Okay, so I only read the first couple of pages because it's Phoronix who have a history of inflamatory and misleading benchmarks, but from what I saw:

• Sometimes Linux is faster.
• Sometimes FreeBSD is faster.
• Usually the difference between the two is smaller than the difference between IA32 and x86-64.
• The tests were mostly either CPU- or I/O-bound, so there are lots of factors beyond the kernel that would affect the results.
• Debian kFreeBSD uses an old FreeBSD kernel, not sure how old the Linux kernel is but it's probably not representative of the speed of recent releases of either kernel.