Benchmarking Operating Systems

Benchmarking of computer systems is an important, albeit sometimes tedious task that gives insight into the performance of a system, exposes flaws, and allows for comparison between systems or versions. Current benchmarking suites for the UNIX operating system are strongly weighted towards CPU and hardware performance. As operating systems grow more complex, so do the applications running on them. The type of open benchmarks that are widely available today do not take this into account, making them somewhat unrealistic and uninformative. We present our solution to this problem which was used to benchmark a library for UNIX we were developing this summer. We discuss tools used, rationale, and conclusions based on the efficacy of each test. We also present drawbacks and future directions for the work.