"Last week we published the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks
that compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of this Debian port
-- that straps the FreeBSD kernel underneath a Debian GNU user-land
-- to Debian GNU/Linux. We have now extended that comparison to put
many other operating systems in a direct performance comparison to
these Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0
Squeeze to Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and
OpenSolaris 2009.06.
"With Debian GNU/kFreeBSD using the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel, we threw
the full FreeBSD 7.2 operating system into the comparison mix.
FreeBSD 8.0 was added in since that is the latest FreeBSD stable
release at this time. OpenBSD 4.6 was used as another *BSD
comparison while OpenSolaris 2009.06 was used to represent some Sun
Solaris numbers. Fedora 12 provides a look at some of the latest
Linux packages available more so than the Debian snapshot from
2010-01-14. The 64-bit versions of all operating systems were used
during this testing process.
"The test system was maintained the same as our earlier Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD testing, which was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with
an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of system memory, a 100GB
Hitachi HTS72201 SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M. All
operating systems were left in their stock configurations as much
as possible, but GNOME was installed (through each operating
system's package management system) and running to provide some
commonality. These tests are meant to look at the "out of the box"
performance for each operating system."