DragonFlyBSD 5.3 Works Towards Performance Improvements

Given that DragonFlyBSD recently landed some SMP performance improvements and other performance optimizations in its kernel for 5.3-DEVELOPMENT but as well finished tidying up its Spectre mitigation, this weekend I spent some time running some benchmarks on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 and 5.3-DEVELOPMENT to see how the performance has shifted for an Intel Xeon system.

Using a well-supported Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with 256GB RD400 NVMe SSD, 16GB DDR4, and MSI MS-7998 X299 motherboard, I did clean installs of DragonFlyBSD 5.2-RELEASE and then again using 5.3-DEVELOPMENT from the latest daily ISO image. Each time the HAMMER2 file-system was used and other options kept at their defaults. On both releases, GCC 5.4.1 was the stock system compiler.

These DragonFlyBSD benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source BSD/Linux/macOS/Windows/Solaris benchmarking framework, the Phoronix Test Suite. As the stable release approaches for what will be DragonFlyBSD 5.4, I'll certainly be back with more benchmarks and on a greater selection of hardware.