OpenBSD fares far worse in performance than Linux and its BSD cousins because they actively avoid supporting CPU, memory, and other features that increase performance via some shared resource because these are often vectors for information leakage and attack.
Everyone else has taken the approach of utilizing these features and getting the performance, but mitigating attacks (or class of attacks) as they are are discovered. Which is not a worse approach per se, especially if your project places a higher value on raw performance (or performance per dollar spent) and you can strengthen security at other layers.
phoronix benchmarks are bad on average, but this one is particularly garbage.
it doesn't make sense for zstd to be performing orders of magnitude slower on some OSs, because the bottleneck (at least at higher compression levels) is pure userspace code. as I recall, someone on the freebsd mailing list found that the actual speed is almost identical, but zstd used a totally wrong timing API on freebsd. phoronix also uses totally different zstd versions and only sets the compression level the same, ignoring that the achieved compression ratio may vary greatly between versions for some special data.
considering these basic errors, the whole benchmark should be considered garbage in garbage out and not useful for any real purpose.
Thanks. I am aware of that test but it is two years old and OpenBSD had quite a few optimisation in between. Hopefully we will have some update test from Phoenix again once FreeBSD 14 releases.
Indeed. There's been a lot of work towards unlocking the kernel and network stack (removing "big locks" that force code to run serially), so it would be cool to see some iperf tests on the same hardware with different OpenBSD versions.
I believe it's an Intel-managed distribution and is heavily optimised for Intel hardware. Not surprising it did so well as the tests in that article were done on an i9.
Clear Linux OS defines its minimum hardware requirements to be second-generation Intel® microarchitecture code name Westmere (released in 2010) or later.
