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No *BSD?
Right? Where's freebsd gone. Would have thought freebsd would squeeze out extra performance from them
FreeBSD is unlikely to squeeze performance out of these. Particularly disadvantaged because the high speed networking vendors favored in many of these ignore FreeBSD (Windows is at best an afterthought), only Linux is thoroughly supported.
Broadly speaking, FreeBSD was left behind in part because of copyleft and in part by doing too good a job of packaging.
In the 90s, if a company made a go of a commercial operating system sourced from a community, they either went FreeBSD and effectively forked it and kept their variant closed source and didn't contribute upstream, or went Linux and were generally forced to upstream changes by copyleft.
Part of it may be due to the fact that a Linux installation is not from a single upstream, but assembled from various disparate projects by a 'distribution'. There's no canonical set of kernel+GUI+compilers+utilities for Linux, but FreeBSD owns a much more prescriptive project. I think that's gotten a bit looser over time, but back in the 90s FreeBSD was a one-stop-shop, batteries included project that included everything the OS needed maintained under a single authority. Linux needed distributions and that created room for entities like RedHat and SUSE to make their mark.
So ultimately, when those traditionally commercial Unix shops started seeing x86 hardware with a commercially supported Unix-alike, they could pull the trigger. FreeBSD was a tougher pitch since they hadn't attracted something like a RedHat/SUSE that also opted into open source model of business engagement.
Looking at the performance of these applications on these systems, it's hard to imagine an OS doing better. Moving data is generally as close to zero copy as a use case can get, these systems tend to run essentially a single application at a time, so the cpu and io scheduling hardly matter. The community used to sweat 'jitter' but at this point those background tasks are such a rounding error in the overall system performance they aren't worth even thinking about anymore.
I think that's a broad generalisation and it'll strongly depend on the task, e.g. see below. On the first benchmark page freebsd blows Linux out of the water for tasks like video encoding and that's my personal experience too
Video encoding is generally not a likely workload in an HPC environment. Also those results I'm not sure if that is really FreeBSD versus everyone else, or clang vs. everyone else. I would have liked to see clang results on the Linux side. It's possible that BSDs core libraries did better, but they probably weren't doing that much and odds are the compiler made all the difference, and HPC is notorious for just offering users every compiler they can get their hands on.
Kernel specifically makes a difference from some of those tests (forking, favoring linux strongly, semaphores favoring BSD strongly). The vector math and particularly the AVX512 results would be most applicable to HPC users, and the Linux results are astoundingly better. This might be due to some linear algebra library that only bothered to do Linux and the test suite used that when it was available. Alternatively, it could have been because BSD either lacked or defaulted to a different CPU frequency management strategy that got in the way of vector math performance.