Benchmarks: FreeBSD 13 vs. NetBSD 9.2 vs. OpenBSD 7 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6 vs. Linux

It's been a while since last having a hearty BSD benchmark comparison on Phoronix in part due to the latest hardware platforms generally lagging behind with how well supported they are by the various BSDs. But stemming from a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requesting some fresh BSD benchmarks, here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1, FreeBSD 13.0, NetBSD 9.2, and OpenBSD 7.0 are competing against various Linux distributions like CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu.

To make this large BSD vs. Linux benchmark comparison possible, an Intel Core i9 10980XE "Cascade Lake X" workstation was used for testing as it is mature and worked well across all of the BSDs tested. There were not any issues with any of the BSDs tested from the onboard networking to storage and all other key functionality being in place. Intel hardware generally leads when it comes to newer platforms working well on the major BSDs while the AMD hardware support has been improving and AArch64 servers are also making progress on the major BSDs.

The two year old Intel Core i9 10980XE was used for its more mature platform support among these open-source operating systems.

The same system was used throughout for all testing with the 18-core/36-thread Core i9 10980XE at stock speeds (clock and core/thread differences in the system table amount to OS reporting differences) on the ASRock X299 Steel Legend motherboard, Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD storage, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics though the GPU performance isn't a focus for this article given the varying driver support across the BSDs.

In full this out-of-the-box, Linux/BSD operating system benchmark comparison included:

- CentOS Linux 8
- Clear Linux 35320
- DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1
- FreeBSD 13.0
- NetBSD 9.2
- OpenBSD 7.0
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.10

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of Linux/BSD open-source benchmarks were carried out.