In Other BSDs for 2016/08/13

The Lumina release is the highlight of the week.

 

8 Replies to “In Other BSDs for 2016/08/13”

  1. I don’t bother linking to Phoronix benchmarks anymore. They don’t measure anything in a useful way.

  2. Well, in theory good benchmark should show which OS has better SMP implementation for example. If OS1 renders 3D scene on multicore machine 1 hour and OS2 renders 2 hours then OS1 has a lot better SMP and is faster then OS2, isn’t it?

  3. How would you know it was a multiprocessing issue?

    Also: both machines should be using the same file system and compiler and the programs used were compiled with the same options and are at the same release level and haven’t been tweaked to support specific operating system features of one system and there are no support files present on one system and not the other, and those support libraries are also at the same version, compiled with the same options. It should be pretty clear at this point why accurate benchmarks are difficult.

  4. You are right, but for end user if OS1 is two times faster than OS2 for rendering on the same machine, then OS1 is simply better. Compilers, file systems, etc doesn’t matter. OS1 is better because it renders quicker.

  5. It would be useful if someone asks the question, “why is there such a speed difference?” Chance are good – if you did have that serious a difference, which we don’t in this case – that it’s something like a missing library or a software version problem, not the actual operating system.

    It becomes a news item: “Linux is twice as fast as any BSD!” Maybe that’s because someone was using a benchmark with a math library that runs poorly on anything that’s not Linux – possibly even through a conscious decision by the programmer to do things a certain way, without thinking of benchmarks, and without the person running the benchmark finding out why.

    That’s not evidence, that’s propaganda, and that’s one of the ways it can happen. Yep, I’m also describing a potential situation, not the benchmark from the original link – but one I’ve seen happen.

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