5 Years of Linux Kernel Releases Benchmarked

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks of the past five years worth of Linux kernel releases, from the Linux 2.6.12 through Linux 2.6.37 (dev) releases. The results from these benchmarks of 26 versions show that, for the most part, new features haven't affected performance."

Comments

Virtual machine, really?

[edelholz]

They tested in a VM. Now where's the proof that by itself doesn't affect performance in an unpredictable way?

You call those kernel benchmarks?

[m4c north]

Where are the kernel-level tests that do more than exercise the filesystem and network driver (singular) and the scheduler? More than half of those charts were flat, which could mean they weren't making appropriate measurements.

For example, show how mutexes have improved, or copy-on-write, or interrupt handlers, or timers, or workqueues, or kmalloc, or anything else that a system and kernel programmer would care about. I like the user-centric perspective: it's very good information to have and share, but don't call what you've done a kernel benchmark. Maybe call it a kernel survey of its impact on users.