FreeBSD 14.1 vs. FreeBSD 14.0 Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen Threadripper

Debuting last week was FreeBSD 14.1 with performance improvements and more. Given there being some performance optimizations and other upgrades like a more recent LLVM Clang compiler by default, I've begun running some benchmarks of this newest FreeBSD stable release. In today's article is a quick comparison of FreeBSD 14.1 vs. FreeBSD 14.0 performance using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X 64-core processor within the System76 Thelio Major workstation.

Before getting to the FreeBSD 14.1 vs. 14.0 performance, for those wondering about the FreeBSD 14 compatibility with this latest-generation System76 Thelio workstation... It "just works" with the notable exception though of the wired networking. But the built-in WiFi of the system had worked fine so that was used instead.

Given that FreeBSD 14.1 has some SIMD optimized code paths for AMD64 with its C library, upgraded to the LLVM Clang 18 compiler by default, a newer OpenZFS release, and other kernel improvements and software upgrades, I set out to run some fresh out-of-the-box performance tests. The same hardware, of course, was used for both runs with just changing out the FreeBSD installation.

A few dozen benchmarks were run for this FreeBSD 14.1 vs. 14.0 comparison while I have also begun a larger multi-BSD operating system performance comparison too for a fresh 2024 look at the BSD performance.