Given the recent release of FreeBSD 15, I started off my testing in looking at how FreeBSD 15.0 improves performance versus FreeBSD 14.3. Now it’s onto the next important question: how is FreeBSD 15.0 performing relative to Linux on servers? Here are some benchmarks exploring that topic today.
In today’s article is a look at how FreeBSD 15.0 is performing against Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu 25.10 on the same AMD EPYC server. Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS was tested given its popularity on servers and in enterprise environments. Ubuntu 25.10 was also tested for a leading-edge Linux software stack recently released for seeing how its performance compares to FreeBSD 15.0, especially with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS being just a few months away.
The same AMD EPYC 9965P 96-core server with 12 x 64GB DDR5 memory, Micron 7450 Max 3.2TB NVMe SSD, and Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard were used for all of these Ubuntu and FreeBSD 15.0 benchmarks. With each Ubuntu release it was also tested in its default ACPI CPUFreq Schedutil configuration and repeating the tests with switching over to the “performance” CPU frequency scaling governor to better match the frequency behavior of FreeBSD.
Originally I intended for a larger BSD vs. Linux comparison on this AMD EPYC Zen 5 server. Unfortunately, the other BSDs didn’t behave so nicely on this modern server.
DragonFlyBSD 6.4.2 failed to boot on this Supermicro server platform with encountering a fatal trap.
Booting NetBSD 10.1 just yielded a blank screen followed by the server rebooting.
OpenBSD 7.8 also failed to boot on this server.
FreeBSD 15.0 and even the FreeBSD 14.x releases booted fine on this Supermicro AMD EPYC server. So in the end it was just a FreeBSD vs. Ubuntu Linux comparison for getting an idea how these operating systems are competing for performance as we end out 2025.
