From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 24 17:43:43 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D02CB16A4B3 for ; Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:43:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mta11.adelphia.net (mta11.adelphia.net [68.168.78.205]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D9FFF43F3F for ; Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:43:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from andi_payn@speedymail.org) Received: from [10.1.0.9] ([68.65.235.109]) by mta11.adelphia.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.05 201-253-122-130-105-20030824) with ESMTP id <20031025004345.KPMT24677.mta11.adelphia.net@[10.1.0.9]>; Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:43:45 -0400 From: andi payn To: Alessio Caffi In-Reply-To: <20031024214427.22367.qmail@web20709.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20031024214427.22367.qmail@web20709.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain Message-Id: <1067042620.38004.1429.camel@verdammt.falcotronic.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.4.5 Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:43:41 -0700 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Linux port..... X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 00:43:44 -0000 On Fri, 2003-10-24 at 14:44, Alessio Caffi wrote: > dear FreeBSD team: > I am a new user to both Linux and FreeBSD. I installed > both system (4.8 and slackware 9) under VMware for > windows they are working ok. > Before parting my HD and do a real installation , > without VMware emulator. I am interested to know which > of one runs faster. What about Linux program under > FreeBSD, will they run slower or same speed as native > Linux OS. The short answer is that most linux programs run at about the same speed under linux and FreeBSD. Running linux software on FreeBSD is also about the same speed as recompiling the source for FreeBSD native. This is what you'd expect, and this is _usually_ what you get. There are a few exceptions (all of which have nothing to do with the linux "emulation," but which will still affect you). I should mention that I'm certainly not an expert--until the past few weeks, I hadn't used a BSD operating system in years. Also, I'm using FreeBSD 5.1 vs. various Mandrake versions, and (briefly) Redhat 6.2 and 8.1. But I can offer some observations from my (limited) experience. 1. Multimedia may be much slower on FreeBSD, if you have hardware for which acceleration is either non-existent or harder to get working on FreeBSD. On my ATI Rage, for example, I can't get DRI, or Xv, or vidix working on FreeBSD. This means that full-screen games, OpenGL apps, mplayer, etc. all run very slow on FreeBSD. If you don't have hardware for which this is an true, or don't plan to do much multimedia/gaming, this won't affect you; otherwise, it's a huge difference. 2. UFS seems to write significantly faster than ext3 in some cases. Things like squid proxies, mail servers, web browsers, GNOME programs that do too much gconf'ing, etc. seem noticeably faster in FreeBSD. This only matters if you spend a lot of time running apps that don't play well with ext3 (in which case you should be usin Reiser, XFS, or whatever's best for your usage in linux anyway). 3. FreeBSD's swapping may also be smarter or faster. Or maybe not. I know that, e.g., working with gigantic files in gimp seems to be a little faster than under linux, and the memory-leak bug in SMAC doesn't make the game slow to a crawl quite as quickly. This may be a consequence of /tmp, etc. being on UFS, or something completely different. 4. While running a similar set of services, FreeBSD may be using less background processing time. Or maybe not. I definitely see significantly lower CPU usage (idling under X, FreeBSD shows about 2-10% CPU, linux about 15-35%). However, this may just be an artifact of linux's notoriously bad reporting, or the fact that I'm using the O(1) kernel and preemptible kernel patches, or maybe something stupid some GNOME applet is doing because I configured it wrong under linux; who knows.... CPU-bound processes certainly don't seem to run a whole lot faster (as they should, if this were something real). Other than these cases, for the most part, I haven't seen much speed difference with linux apps--or ports to FreeBSD.