16 Feb
2022
16 Feb
'22
11:49 p.m.
On Feb 16, 2022, at 2:42 PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 09:27:39AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
My guess is, it was EROS, based on KeyKOS (or GNOSIS), a capability
OS. It used the VM hardware to enforce capabilities so I imagine
it did have a VM system!
http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs428/doc/eros.pdf
The paper does say "microbenchmarks ... inspired by those of
lmbench". My guess is Jon Shapiro wanted to show off his system's
nimbleness. Should not be seen as an apples to apples comparison
with commercial Unix systems.
[Don't want to reopen a microkernel/capability system discussion
here though]
Indeed, when a lot of compilers recognised the
Sieve of Eratosthenes being
used and optimised for it... Wasn't all that long ago that vehicle
manufacturers also started doing the same thing :-)
Indeed. I hated when people cheated because benchmarks should teach you
the capabilities of the machine being benchmarked. They aren't useful
if people cheat.
When I did LMbench, the rules were "cc -O2" and you could not link with
any benchmarking libraries and you could only report a result if you
reported all results.
I had a beef with this guy: https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~shap/ because he
had some toy OS that didn't have a VM system, didn't have networking,
didn't have much of anything, but boy oh boy, did it context switch
fast (because there was no context to speak of). He reported those
numbers in blatant violation of my rules and I had to escalate to
get him to stop. The bummer is he is a smart guy, capable of good
work, there is no need to cheat.