How Does FreeBSD Compare to Linux on a Raspberry Pi?

Mildly offtopic:

I've always thought of distributions (whether they are BSD or Linux) as:

bootloader

kernel/initrd of some sort

/sbin/init

libc

shell / userspace tools

package manager

I think a lot of "noise" is made off of such slight distinction between these

Back on topic:

From the article

> Nope, no match — FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking

How? Like, it's the same hardware, the same processor executing instructions. The Linux kernel/Linux compiled applications are that much slower? That's surprising. I wonder if that could be fixed easily with some kind of config tweaks somewhere. That would strike me as "something is broken" if the performance isn't within 1-3% of each other Linux vs BSD

I find it hyperbolic/probably untrue to say "oh, I ran Linux on my RaspberryPi, it was so slow I couldn't use the web browser. I switch to FreeBSD and it was so much faster it was usable"

> But what about all that lackluster driver support? WiFi drivers still on the 802.11g standard and all? Surely you can't be serious about it when Linux offers all that support out of the box, right? Wrong, actually. For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with.

I installed FreeBSD on a raspberry pi a few years ago, and I don’t think I ever got WiFi working. No FreeBSD is not “at fault” for not being popular enough on the desktop to receive proprietary drivers, but as a user it sure is frustrating to struggle to get such a basic function working

Obviously, if you run some computational benchmark the difference between operating systems should be minimal.

However, what was described in the linked article were the snappiness of an Internet browser and of a graphical desktop and the USB and audio performance.

Those may depend a lot on the operating system support, so they may vary noticeably between operating systems.

While I am using both Linux and FreeBSD on x86, I have not tried FreeBSD on Arm, mainly because it has official support only for a few SBCs. Because Linux on RaspberryPi felt quite slow, I would not be surprised if a FreeBSD desktop feels snappier.

In general, Linux has support for a much greater variety of hardware than FreeBSD, but among those kinds of devices that are supported by both it cannot be predicted which of the two operating systems will have a better performance for a certain application.

I'm always curious - what do you use that machine for? I'm imagining most of the modern web is unusable.

IIRC correctly from my Late 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook days, that cpu can handle a 64 bits OS (although in my case the EFI could not so you had to modify it in order to be able to boot a 64bits OS)