Abstract

This paper evaluates several hardware platforms and operating systems using a set of benchmarks that stress kernel entry/exit, file systems, and other things related to operating systems. The overall conclusion is that operating system performance is not improving at the same rate as the base speed of the underlying hardware. The most obvious ways to remedy this situation are to improve memory bandwidth and reduce operating systems' tendency to wait for disk operations to complete. 1. Introduction In the summer and fall of 1989 I assembled a collection of operating system benchmarks. My original intent was to compare the performance of Sprite, a UNIXcompatible research operating system developed at the University of California at Berkeley [4,5], with vendorsupported versions of UNIX running on similar hardware. After running the benchmarks on several configurations I noticed that the "fast" machines didn't seem to be running the benchmarks as quickly as I would have guessed from what...

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