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NetBSD 5.0: benchmarks and an introduction


May 02, 2009 posted by Andrew Doran

I have prepared a presentation giving an overview of some of the new features, technology and performance improvements debuting in NetBSD 5.0. You can find the slides from this presentation here:

A comparison of the scalability and performance improvements found in NetBSD 5.0 was conducted against NetBSD 4.0, Fedora Core 10 and FreeBSD 7.1, and is part of the presentation. An outline is below, but for full details on the tests, please refer to the slides. Please click on the images to view a larger version of each.

Benchmark: hackbench

This benchmark tests the efficiency and scalability of the scheduler and IPC (inter-process commmunication) mechanisms. It was created by and is popular with Linux kernel developers. Hackbench quickly exposes problems with SMP scaling, and with high numbers of active tasks.

Benchmark: MySQL sysbench

This test simulates an OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) style database workload. From the OS developer's viewpoint, it measures the efficiency and scalability of threading, memory allocation, and IPC.

Benchmark: build.sh, NetBSD's build system

This test measures how well the operating system scales when given hosting an intensive software development or shell type workload.

Fedora continues to excel due to the significant investment in improving the efficiency and scalability of Linux over the last few years. Our hats are off to the GNU/Linux/Fedora developers. We aim to reverse the position with the release of NetBSD 6.0.

[2 comments]

 

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Comments:

Hi, I have difficulties seeing the significant difference between nbsd 5.0 (green) and Fedora Core (red). In view of the perception that the Linux community has far more developers and funding than nbsd, I would rather take my hat off to nbsd. Good work!

Posted by André Dolenc on August 05, 2009 at 01:28 PM UTC #

Yes hello, hmm.. my idea as far as the previous comment is that there is only so much you can do, and both of them are doing it :o) ... this pretty much goes to say that as far as benchmarks are concerned, and mainstream operating systems, netbsd and linux are the "best performing". NetBSD is so cool :o) best style, best people, best layout. Now all it needs is to become a bit more stable (such as on sparc64), and get a few features in there that linux and solaris have that i'm not quite sure if bsd does yet though am not aware of it. Such as limiting max memory for groups of users, cpu shares for groups, cpu accounting... packet scheduling (qos) that actually works right, modifiable io scheduling (such as linux's ionice). I feel once it takes care of these things, it can actually progress into becoming perhaps the next in-production unix.... n0ah

Posted by Noah McNallie on July 26, 2010 at 02:47 AM UTC #

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