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Phoronix test suite needs method improvements?

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  • Phoronix test suite needs method improvements?

    I am on thin ice here - let me hear if you think I am off track.

    I have read several Phoronix reports about Linux operating system
    benchmarks, and it seems to me you are measuring the wrong stuff.
    I did not see anything that measured the operating system process
    management skills. What I saw was benchmarks measuring compilers
    (speed of compiled code) and single-thread disk throughput.

    The job of an operating system:

    1. manage competing processes
    • low latency for interactive processes needing user input
    • low wait time to resume process after IO complete
    • high efficiency: keep the CPU(s) busy
    • good scheduling fairness when CPU demand is over 100%

    2. manage virtual memory and paging
    • fair and balanced allocation of real memory
    • stop thrashing process from harming overall performance
      (hard fault rate is allocated, balanced)

    3. manage file systems
    • space allocation
    • reduce fragmentation
    • fair and balanced allocation of IO capacity

    Measuring this stuff is admittedly hard. You need a suite of synthetic
    applications that stress all the above resources, and you need to
    measure their aggregate throughput over an extended time period.
    Also a responsiveness benchmark is needed that measures interactive
    responsiveness on a fully loaded system.

    I would like to see how the Linux kernel measures against some of the
    older Unix kernels, BSD, or SunOS.
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