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I wonder how python performance would be like on Tilck. It is pretty bad on freebsd compared to linux.

Can you provide a source for that? I have found the performance between FreeBSD and Linux to be comparable, even when using Python.

To replicate, create two qemu vms. One ubuntu 22.04, one fbsd13.1.

Install any python starting from 3.9

Write a function to sum the first 50_000_000 integers, run it on both.

Maybe, it is QEMU/FreeBSD problem, not FreeBSD/Python one?

I'm using FreeBSD for 20+ years on real hardware and never seen huge performance differences for all common software, which is not using CUDA or alike.

Thanks for that. I found some fbsd forum posts about this, but they also mentioned virtualization.

I also thought this was bollocks so have just been running pyperformance on a virtualised arm64. I have some figures from Linux running on the same platform. I've not been very scientific about it.

FreeBSD is consistently slower. Between 20-50% across the board. I must admit I'm amazed that Python spends enough time calling into the OS to make a difference this big. Perhaps it's a problem with libc? Maybe there's something going on with memory barriers? My "fist unix" was FreeBSD so I'm amazed and just a bit gutted.

Note the other replies @ parent. It seems to be a virtualization specific issue.

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