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

While I agree on most of your points, the value of Phoronix is that it tests the default install.

As an end user, I don’t care that a particular program is twice as fast on a particular Linux distro as it is on FreeBSD because of kernel features, compiler options, or dependency choices.

I would love to see the base system include the ThinLTO (LLVM IR) .a files so that I can do inlining from libc into my program.  I would love for ports to default to ThinLTO unless they break with it.  Apple flipped that switch a few years ago, so a lot of things that broke with ThinLTO are now fixed.

The FreeBSD memcpy / memset implementations look like they’re slower than the latest ones, which can give a 5-10% perf boost on some workloads.  LLVM just landed the automemcpy framework, which is designed by some Google folks to synthesises efficient memcpy implementations tailored to different workloads.

FreeBSD often wins versus glibc-based distros because jemalloc is faster than dlmalloc (the default malloc implementations in FreeBSD libc and glibc, respectively).  I’ve been using snmalloc in my libc for a while and it generally gives me a few percent more perf.  Unfortunately, FreeBSD decided to expose all of the jemalloc non-standard functions from libc, which means I can’t contribute it to upstream without implementing all of those on top of snmalloc or it would be an ABI break.

It would be great if someone could pick up the Phronix benchmark suite and do some profiling: where is FreeBSD spending more time than Linux?  Are there Linux-specific code paths that hit slow paths on FreeBSD and fast paths on Linux that could have FreeBSD-specific fast paths added (e.g. futex vs _umtx_op)?

David


> On 11 Dec 2021, at 10:17, dmilith . <dmilith@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 1. Where are compiler options for BSDs?
> 2. Why they compare -O2 to -O3 code in some benchmarks? Why they enable
> fast math in some, and disable it for others?
> 3. Why they don't mention powerd setup for FreeBSD? By default it may use
> slowest CPU mode. Did they even load cpufreq kernel module?
> 4. Did they even care about default FreeBSD mitigations (via sysctl)
> enabled, or it's only valid for Linuxes? ;)
> 5. What happened to security and environment details of BSDs?
> 
> It's kinda known that guys from Phroenix lack basic knowledge of how to do
> proper performance testing and lack basic knowledge about BSD systems.
> Nothing new. Would take these results with a grain of salt.
> 
> On Sat, 11 Dec 2021 at 10:53, beepc.ch <xpetrl@beepc.ch> wrote:
> 
>>> I am surprised to see that the BSD cluster today has much worse
>> performance
>>> than Linux.
>>> What do you think of this?
>> 
>> "Default" FreeBSD install setting are quite conservative.
>> The Linux common distros are high tuned, those benchmark is in my
>> opinion comparison of apples and oranges.
>> 
>> Comparing "default" FreeBSD install with "default" Slackware install
>> would be more interesting, because Slackware builds are at most vanilla.
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Daniel Dettlaff
> Versatile Knowledge Systems
> verknowsys.com