Phoronix has benchmarked FreeBSD 15.0 against Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu 25.10 on an AMD EPYC server to assess performance differences. The tests highlight FreeBSD's compatibility while other BSD variants failed to boot on the hardware.
The recent release of FreeBSD 15 prompted initial performance comparisons with FreeBSD 14.3. Building on that, benchmarks now evaluate FreeBSD 15.0 against Linux distributions on server hardware, specifically Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu 25.10.
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS remains a staple in server and enterprise settings due to its stability. Ubuntu 25.10, a more recent release, serves as a preview for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, offering an updated software stack for comparison.
All tests utilized identical hardware: an AMD EPYC 9965P processor with 96 cores, 12 modules of 64GB DDR5 memory, a Micron 7450 Max 3.2TB NVMe SSD, and a Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard. For Ubuntu, configurations included the default ACPI CPUFreq Schedutil mode and the 'performance' CPU frequency scaling governor to align with FreeBSD's frequency handling.
A broader comparison across BSD operating systems was planned for this AMD EPYC Zen 5 server. However, issues arose with other variants. DragonFlyBSD 6.4.2 encountered a fatal trap and failed to boot. NetBSD 10.1 resulted in a blank screen followed by a reboot. OpenBSD 7.8 also refused to boot.
In contrast, FreeBSD 15.0 and earlier 14.x releases booted successfully on the Supermicro platform. This limits the analysis to FreeBSD versus Ubuntu as 2025 draws to a close, providing insights into their competitive performance on modern server setups.