Developing Benchmarks to Measure the Performance of the Mach Operating System

We have developed a series of benchmark programs to test the performance of the Mach operating system. A discussion of the philosophy of the benchmarks is given, and the individual benchmark programs are described. Results of the benchmarks on 386-based machines running Mach 2.5, Mach 3.0, and SCO System V/386 are given. Appeared in: Proceedings of the USENIX Mach Workshop, 1990, 83-100. 1 Introduction As Mach progresses towards its micro-kernel version, important questions about its performance need to be answered. The micro-kernel version will have some clear advantages over the monolithic kernel version: removal of contention points, improved portability, scalability, and ease of maintenance. However, an important question is how much these changes will affect performance. The micro-kernel version of Mach must demonstrate good performance if Mach is to gain acceptance outside the research community. This research is supported by a grant from the Research Institute of the Open S..