"FreeBSD 8.0 introduced support for a TTY layer rewrite, network stack virtualization, improved support for the Sun ZFS file-system, the ULE kernel scheduler by default, a new USB stack, binary compatibility against Fedora 10, and improvements to its 64-bit kernel will allow a NVIDIA 64-bit FreeBSD driver by year's end, among a plethora of other changes. With today's benchmarking -- compared to our initial Ubuntu 9.10 vs. FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks from September -- we are using the official build of FreeBSD 8.0 without any debugging options and we are also delivering a greater number of test results in this article, along with a greater number of operating systems being compared.
"The hardware we are using for benchmarking this time was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 2GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 7200RPM SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics processor powering a 1680 x 1050 LVDS panel.
"Summarizing some of the key packages found in each operating system, FreeBSD 8.0 was running with the 8.0-RELEASE kernel, GNOME 2.26.3 desktop, X Server 1.6.1, GCC 4.2.1, and the default UFS file-system. FreeBSD 7.2 was released earlier this year with the 7.2-RELEASE kernel, GNOME 2.26.0, X Server 1.6.0, GCC 4.2.1, and the UFS file-system. Ubuntu 9.10 was running with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, GCC 4.4.1, and the EXT4 file-system. Fedora 12 runs with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel too on the desktop side is GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.7.1, and uses GCC 4.4.2 as its compiler. EXT4 also is the default file-system in Fedora. Build 127 of OpenSolaris 2010.02 uses the 5.11 kernel, GNOME 2.28.0, X Server 1.6.5, GCC 4.3.2, and the famed ZFS file-system. The 32-bit versions of all operating systems were used, due to no NVIDIA FreeBSD 64-bit driver being yet available for testing, but one should be available by the end of this year."
