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
2. manage virtual memory and paging
3. manage file systems
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.
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.