NetBSD 5.0: benchmarks and an introduction

I have prepared a presentation giving an overview of some of the new features, technology and performance improvements debuting in NetBSD 5.0. You can find the slides from this presentation here:

• HTML format (browseable)
• PDF format (for printers or projectors)

A comparison of the scalability and performance improvements found in NetBSD 5.0 was conducted against NetBSD 4.0, Fedora Core 10 and FreeBSD 7.1, and is part of the presentation. An outline is below, but for full details on the tests, please refer to the slides. Please click on the images to view a larger version of each.

Benchmark: hackbench

This benchmark tests the efficiency and scalability of the scheduler and IPC (inter-process commmunication) mechanisms. It was created by and is popular with Linux kernel developers. Hackbench quickly exposes problems with SMP scaling, and with high numbers of active tasks.

Benchmark: MySQL sysbench

This test simulates an OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) style database workload. From the OS developer's viewpoint, it measures the efficiency and scalability of threading, memory allocation, and IPC.

Benchmark: build.sh, NetBSD's build system

This test measures how well the operating system scales when given hosting an intensive software development or shell type workload.

Fedora continues to excel due to the significant investment in improving the efficiency and scalability of Linux over the last few years. Our hats are off to the GNU/Linux/Fedora developers. We aim to reverse the position with the release of NetBSD 6.0.