3 ms·

Mildly offtopic: I've always thought of distributions (whether they are BSD or Linux) as: bootloader kernel/initrd of some sort /sbin/init libc shell / us

Mildly offtopic: I've always thought of distributions (whether they are BSD or Linux) as: bootloader kernel/initrd of some sort /sbin/init libc shell / userspace tools package manager I think a lot of "noise" is made off of such slight distinction between these Back on topic: From the article > Nope, no match — FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking How? Like, it's the same hardware, the same processor executing instructions. The Linux kernel/Linux compiled applications are that much slower? That's surprising. I wonder if that could be fixed easily with some kind of config tweaks somewhere. That would strike me as "something is broken" if the performance isn't within 1-3% of each other Linux vs BSD I find it hyperbolic/probably untrue to say "oh, I ran Linux on my RaspberryPi, it was so slow I couldn't use the web browser. I switch to FreeBSD and it was so much faster it was usable"

medler 3y ago
> “You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it“ So it sounds like the alleged difference in performance is subjective based on interactive use, not benchmark numbers. Just speculating here but I would guess this comes down to differences in CPU scheduling algorithms. Last I checked, Linux and FreeBSD used very different scheduling algorithms.
- Hydraulix989 3y ago
  Right. The job of an OS is to mostly stay out of the way of running code, until there is a system call or context switch.
adrian_b 3y ago
Obviously, if you run some computational benchmark the difference between operating systems should be minimal. However, what was described in the linked article were the snappiness of an Internet browser and of a graphical desktop and the USB and audio performance. Those may depend a lot on the operating system support, so they may vary noticeably between operating systems. While I am using both Linux and FreeBSD on x86, I have not tried FreeBSD on Arm, mainly because it has official support only for a few SBCs. Because Linux on RaspberryPi felt quite slow, I would not be surprised if a FreeBSD desktop feels snappier. In general, Linux has support for a much greater variety of hardware than FreeBSD, but among those kinds of devices that are supported by both it cannot be predicted which of the two operating systems will have a better performance for a certain application.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
If you stay 100% within your own application and don't touch syscalls or libraries then yes they should perform identically (other than other processes using the CPU and I guess maybe default CPU speed settings). In practice, you're going to makes syscalls and use other libraries, which means that the kernel is an extremely important part of the overall performance picture and the design decisions that are baked into those libraries matters.

medler 3y ago

> “You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it“ So it sounds like the alleged difference in performance is subjective based on interactive use, not benchmark numbers. Just speculating here but I would guess this comes down to differences in CPU scheduling algorithms. Last I checked, Linux and FreeBSD used very different scheduling algorithms.

Hydraulix989 3y ago
Right. The job of an OS is to mostly stay out of the way of running code, until there is a system call or context switch.

adrian_b 3y ago

Obviously, if you run some computational benchmark the difference between operating systems should be minimal. However, what was described in the linked article were the snappiness of an Internet browser and of a graphical desktop and the USB and audio performance. Those may depend a lot on the operating system support, so they may vary noticeably between operating systems. While I am using both Linux and FreeBSD on x86, I have not tried FreeBSD on Arm, mainly because it has official support only for a few SBCs. Because Linux on RaspberryPi felt quite slow, I would not be surprised if a FreeBSD desktop feels snappier. In general, Linux has support for a much greater variety of hardware than FreeBSD, but among those kinds of devices that are supported by both it cannot be predicted which of the two operating systems will have a better performance for a certain application.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

If you stay 100% within your own application and don't touch syscalls or libraries then yes they should perform identically (other than other processes using the CPU and I guess maybe default CPU speed settings). In practice, you're going to makes syscalls and use other libraries, which means that the kernel is an extremely important part of the overall performance picture and the design decisions that are baked into those libraries matters.