PC-BSD / FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 28 January 2016 at 08:00 AM EST. 6 Comments
BSD
Last week I had plans to run some fresh FreeBSD vs. Linux gaming benchmarks using the FreeBSD's Linux software binary compatibility layer.

For those that don't know, FreeBSD boasts a Linux binary compatibility initiative. Five years ago I did some Linux gaming tests on FreeBSD within FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?. I wanted to do some modern tests atop the latest FreeBSD/PC-BSD code and the latest NVIDIA driver.

So I decided to go for this month's PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT release to get the bleeding-edge state of the FreeBSD performance and for best Linux binary compatibility. While PC-BSD ships with the support enabled by default and I did install all of the relevant CentOS-derived packages from Ports, I couldn't get any of my usual OpenGL Linux game / tech demo benchmarks (32-bit, since the 64-bit Linux binary support on FreeBSD is incomplete) running under 11.0-CURRENT. All my attempts were foiled by segmentation faults.


Five years ago I got the FreeBSD Linux binary compatibility support working real good as shown in those earlier results, but whatever the case, I couldn't get it working well on FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT. After a few hours I had to throw in the towel and focus on other work. However, in not to spoil having a clean FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT installation around, I did some quick benchmarks of this latest release.

PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT with this month's image was using the 11.0-CURRENT kernel (obviously), GCC 4.8.5 and Clang 3.7 were setup as the compiler stack, and ZFS continues to be the default PC-BSD file-system. For putting the PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT results into some perspective, I then installed Fedora 23 x86_64 on this same system: comprised of an Intel Core i7 5960X, 16GB of RAM, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics.
FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT January 2016 vs. Fedora 23

If you want to see these PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT vs. Fedora 23 Linux benchmarks from this Core i7 Haswell system, see this OpenBenchmarking.org result file for the few results to share today. As FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 is nearing its official release, plenty more thorough benchmarks will obviously come.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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