FreeBSD vs. SmartOS: Who's Faster for Jails, Zones, and bhyve VMs?
a day ago
- Benchmarks reflect specific hardware and workloads, not universally applicable results.
- A PCEngines APU running Proxmox failed after seven years due to power surges, prompting a replacement with an Intel N150 MiniPC.
- The author tested multiple virtualization options on the N150 and an i7-7500U for comparison.
- OS-level containers (jails and zones) showed negligible CPU overhead, near bare-metal performance.
- Memory benchmarks revealed significant differences: bhyve on i7 had 0.52% overhead, while on N150 it was 9%, likely due to missing optimizations.
- SmartOS native and LX zones delivered top memory performance, beating FreeBSD bare metal by up to 25%.
- Legacy KVM on SmartOS underperformed severely, making bhyve the preferred choice.
- FreeBSD demonstrated superior bhyve HVM performance on mature hardware, with near-zero overhead.
- The final recommendation depends on workload: SmartOS for container speed and Linux flexibility, FreeBSD for pure HVM performance.
- bhyve emerged as the key technology for the client's new server.