BSD-Powered helloSystem 0.8 Performance Against Linux On AMD Zen 4
With many Phoronix readers having been excited by the recent helloSystem v0.8 release as a FreeBSD-powered OS taking major design inspiration from Apple's macOS, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how this FreeBSD 13.1 based operating system was competing with a few different Linux distributions from an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (Zen 4) desktop.
As I haven't done much in the way of BSD/FreeBSD performance testing on AMD Zen 4, I was curious as well to see how this FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE based helloSystem 0.8 would run on this 16 core / 32 thread Ryzen processor out-of-the-box. For gauging the performance of helloSystem 0.8 on the AMD desktop, I ran Linux benchmarks on Fedora Workstation 37, the Arch Linux based Endeavour OS rolling, and Ubuntu 22.10 for measuring up the overall system performance.
The helloSystem, Fedora Workstation, EndeavourOS, and Ubuntu operating systems were all cleanly installed on the same hardware and tested in their default/out-of-the-box configuration. The system was built around the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X at stock speeds with the ASUS X670E HERO motherboard, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 system memory, 2TB Solidigm P41 Pro NVMe solid-state drive, and Radeon RX graphics although not tested in this article for not having AMD RDNA2 graphics support on helloSystem v0.8.
From there an assortment of different open-source benchmarks were carried out for seeing how the FreeBSD--powered, Apple-inspired helloSystem was competing with these modern Linux distributions.