FIrst the tests at the site you mentioned werent ran against a standalone kernel as far as i understand that. they were run against a complete OS and talking about upgrading, gentoo truly rocks.
you misunderstood what i said. the tests did compare linux with freebsd, and focused entirely on kernel operations (networking, memory access, etc). i was talking about what
you were comparing, not the tests. you said:
can you elaborate on the point you made that bsd has a better overall system integration that linux. it it is so, howcome 2.6 excels freebsd??
system integration has little to nothing to do with those tests. the 2.6 kernel is better (as shown in the tests) than freebsd's, but that's not because of freebsd's release management.
I think FreeBSD wont optimize every package for ia64 but gentoo does.
that's incorrect. why do you think that? it will optimize for ia64 or x86-64, just the same way that it'll optimize for a p4 or a k5.
Talking about system integration, it's really nice about *BSDs to document every call but as far as organizing of binaries and config is concerned, aint linux doing that??
actually, no. look through your /usr/sbin, and see how many of those programs have man pages. what about the rest? what good is organization when you can't figure out what a program does?
what if one of those utilities (which you may never use, which is on all your systems) has a security bug? suddenly, an app you're not aware of can be used to break into your system!
From an admin point of view, i am concerned with the performace of my system.
but that's not all you're concerned about, is it? i mean, if that were the case, most of your apps would be written in c, and not (say) php.
A linux distro with a 2.6 kernel is "right now" better than a BSD.
a linux 2.6 kernel is better than a freebsd kernel at some tasks. a linux distribution may or may not be better. certainly, i don't think linux distributions are better.
Right now as far as my understanding works, you wont like to move to the latest BSDs coz of their sluggish performace while linux admins are bound to move to 2.6 after its exhelling performance.
i will point out that you came into this as a linux user, and you've left as a linux user. i don't know where you got the impression that freebsd is sluggish -- the code tested at the url (which is eight months old, and from a previous release) beat linux 2.4 in performance. that's no easy feat.
the
only way that you'll truly find out which one is better for you is to deploy your apps on both and see which one works better. anything else is speculation. it doesn't matter if linux 2.6 can fork faster than freebsd -- if you rarely fork. it doesn't matter if freebsd can handle more sockets than linux if you never have more than a few hundred simultaneous connections.
given my past experience with 2.4 and freebsd, i know freebsd works better under load, so yes, i'll stick with it.