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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!nntp.uio.no!news.apfel.de!fu-berlin.de!informatik.tu-muenchen.de!paysan.modem.informatik.tu-muenchen.de!news From: Bernd Paysan <paysan@informatik.tu-muenchen.de> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.arch,comp.benchmarks Subject: Re: benchmarking discussion at Usenix? Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 23:49:52 +0100 Organization: Bernd Paysan, 81477 Muenchen, Germany Lines: 37 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <32D18190.369A6C81@informatik.tu-muenchen.de> References: <5am7vo$gvk@fido.asd.sgi.com> <5aonle$8lr@uriah.heep.sax.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: paysan.modem.informatik.tu-muenchen.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (X11; I; Linux 2.1.17 i586) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33642 comp.arch:62179 comp.benchmarks:18656 J Wunsch wrote: > > lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com (Larry McVoy) wrote: > > > . osbench > > - Steve Kleiman suggested that I (or someone) grab a big hunk > > of OS code and port it to userland and call it osbench. This > > is an interesting idea. > > Only curious: what are the goals for this? OS code has somewhat different characteristic from user code. If you look into something like the Linux kernel, you'll see a number of functions with many tests (e.g. for error condition), often calls to other functions, most of them small, and few loops. But I wonder if porting to userland gives a good benchmark. Part of the OS workload game is the switch between user land and kernel land for each OS call. Another part is exception and interrupt handling. Porting parts of an OS to user land gives a benchmark that shows how typical OS code would perform. In other words: you can vaguely guess how fast Linux might run on this CPU, and more vaguely guess how other OSes will run (given that the code will be taken from Linux). Not as accurate as running real Linux (or NetBSD, to avoid any holy war ;-). Advantages over the real thing: much more portable, and better to get a stable basis (think of all the Linux hackers benchmarking the latest hacker kernel ;-). > [No, i certainly can't afford to come to Usenix. :)] Sad, but me too. -- Bernd Paysan "Late answers are wrong answers!" http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~paysan/