FreeBSD 14.1 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6.4 vs. NetBSD 10 vs. Linux Benchmarks

After last week looking at how FreeBSD 14.1 has improved performance over FreeBSD 14.0, here is an expanded cross-OS comparison now looking at how the new FreeBSD 14.1 stable release compares to the recently released NetBSD 10.0, the current DragonFlyBSD 6.4 release, and then CentOS Stream 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for some Linux comparison data points.

This round of benchmarking has a look at FreeBSD 14.1, DragonFlyBSD 6.4, NetBSD 10.0, CentOS Stream 9, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Originally the plan was to also have OpenBSD 7.5 in the mix but that BSD operating system was having issues on the system under test. OpenBSD 7.5 booted fine from USB for installation but when it came to post-installation use when booting the installed system the display wouldn't work nor was there any network connectivity and thus no ability to SSH into the system. So something was going awry with the current OpenBSD release on this high-end workstation system while at least FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and NetBSD all worked fine with their latest releases.

The same system hardware was used throughout all of the testing and was a System76 Thelio Major powered by an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X. This system was powered by the 64-core Zen 4 Threadripper 7980X, 128GB (4 x 32GB DDR5-4800) memory, 1TB Crucial NVMe SSD, and Radeon PRO W7900 graphics.

Each Linux and BSD operating system was cleanly installed and then tested the out-of-the-box performance in a variety of Linux/BSD-compatible tests, including the default compiler on each platform and other default packages.