[TUHS] new paper comparing Unix kernel designs

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Fri Mar 2 09:28:18 AEST 2018


A new paper comparing Unix kernel designs was published earlier today:

	Stergios Papadimitriou and Lefteris Moussiades
	Mac OS versus FreeBSD: A Comparative Evaluation
	[IEEE] Computer 52(2), 44--53, February 2018
	https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2018.1451648

Despite the title, GNU/Linux also is included in the comparisons.  The
abstract is:

>> ...
>> FreeBSD (an open source Unix-like OS) and Apple's Mac OS use similar
>> BSD functionality but take different approaches. FreeBSD implements a
>> traditional compact monolithic Unix kernel, whereas Mac OS builds the
>> BSD Unix functionality on top of the Mach microkernel. The authors
>> provide an in-depth technical investigation of both approaches.
>> ...

Our fellow list member Larry McVoy, and his lmbench suite, are
mentioned in the article, along with results of that suite.

There are about 200 numbers in the two large tables of performance
measurements, and while many are comparable across operating systems,
there are some benchmarks that show up to a 40x difference between
systems on the same hardware.

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