Benchmarking Debian's GNU/kFreeBSD

[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for this link. ]

"There has been an effort underway within the Debian development community to pull the FreeBSD kernel within this distribution to provide an alternative to using the Linux kernel. In essence with this Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project you have the standard Debian package set providing a GNU user-land with a GNU C library, but the FreeBSD kernel is running underneath. The Debian project has also been working on Debian GNU/Hurd to effectively do the same thing but with the GNU Mach microkernel. But unlike Debian GNU/Hurd, with the release of Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will reach a release status. With the Debian Squeeze release being just two months away we have decided to provide the first public set of benchmarks that compare the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD performance to that of Debian GNU/Linux. We have tested both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Debian with the Linux and FreeBSD kernels.

"For over a month we have been seeking to provide benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, but now it has finally reached a point where we feel comfortable with benchmarking this FreeBSD kernel in Debian. Until the release of Debian 6.0, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is just available using bootable daily images found at d-i.debian.org within the kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 directories. There is no Debian GNU/kFreeBSD support at this time for ARM, PowerPC, or other architectures. Some of the initial challenges we faced with this Debian FreeBSD variant was the installer not working properly and running into other problems, but recent builds seem to be working much better than in past weeks. Installing GNOME on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is working quite well too through the Debian package repository. About the only outstanding problem we have at this point is NVIDIA's binary FreeBSD driver not working with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD."

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