I think a guy like that would not have any trouble finding another job. It's more likely he was suffering from severe depression, a complex and sometimes tragically undiagnosed illness. Sad to see him go. I see he died on the same day as my mom two weeks ago :-(
SL is a RHEL clone like CentOS. This was the 6.1 release, which is 2.6.32 (plus a ton of patches) and corresponds closely to Red Hat's latest and greatest. It's not an unreasonable choice if you just want to add a "Linux" line to the graph.
Remember this is a narrow benchmark of multi-core scalability under a SQL load. It's not particularly useful as evidence in OS flames, and the goal isn't to see "how much faster" Linux is, but rather to characterize areas where Dragonfly needs work.
(I will admit I was surprised at how much better Linux did at the heavy-SMP side of the graph though. Edit for clarity: I'm not at all surprised that Linux does well; I live in that world too. I'm surprised that it does so much better than the BSDs. At the right edge of the graph, Linux is still flat where the other kernels are dropping fast due to overhead, and Linux is doing 3x-4x better. That's surprising.)
I'm surprised that you're surprised- there are a lot of people who work on the Linux kernel, more than Dragonfly or FreeBSD, and they generally care much more about this sort of graph than desktop performance.
