Operating system benchmarking in the wake of lmbench: A case study of the performance of NetBSD on the Intel x86 architecture

The lmbench suite of operating system microbenchmarks provides a set of portable programs for use in cross-platform comparisons. We have augmented the fmbench suite to increase its flexibility and precision, and to improve its methodological and statistical opera-tion. This enables the detailed study of interactions between the operating system and the hardware architecture. We describe mod-ifications to bnbench, and then use our new benchmark suite, hbench:OS, to examine how the performance of operating system primitives under NetBSD has scaled with the processor evolution of the Intel x86 architecture. Our analysis shows that off-chip memory system design continues to influence operating system performance in a significant way and that key design decisions (such as suboptimal choices of DRAM and cache technology, and memory-bus and cache coherency protocols) can essentially nul-lify the performance benefits of the aggressive execution core and sophisticated on-chip memory system of a modem processor such as the Intel Pentium Pro.