While for something else, I ran across these 3 papers...

ftp://deas-ftp.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-31-95.ps.gz

TR-31-95 [tr-31-95.ps.gz (61 K)]
     Christopher Small and Margo Seltzer. 1995. ``Scheduler Activations on BSD:
     Sharing Thread Management Between Kernel and Application.'' 

         There are two commonly used thread models: kernel level threads
         and user level threads. Kernel level threads suffer from the cost of
         frequent user-kernel domain crossings and fixed kernel
         scheduling priorities. User level threads are not integrated with
         the kernel, blocking all threads whenever one thread is blocked.
         The Scheduler Activations model, proposed by Anderson et al.,
         combines kernel CPU allocation decisions with application
         control over thread scheduling. This paper discusses the
         performance characteristics of an implementation of Scheduler
         Activations for a uniprocessor BSD system, and proposes an
         analytic model for determining the class of applications that
         benefit from its use. Our implementation required fewer than two
         hundred lines of kernel code and provides an order of magnitude
         performance improvement over process-level facilities.


ftp://deas-ftp.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-19-95.ps.gz

TR-19-95 [tr-19-95.ps.gz (541 K)]
     Diane L. Tang. 1995. ``Benchmarking Filesystems.'' 

         One of the most widely researched areas in operating systems is
         filesystem design, implementation, and performance. Almost all
         of the research involves reporting performance numbers gathered
         from a variety of different benchmarks. The problem with such
         results is that existing filesystem benchmarks are inadequate,
         suffering from problems ranging from not scaling with advancing
         technology to not measuring the filesystem. 

         A new approach to filesystem benchmarking is presented here.
         This methodology is designed both to help system designers
         understand and improve existing systems and to help users
         decide which filesystem to buy or run. For usability, the
         benchmark is separated into two parts: a suite of
         micro-benchmarks, which is actually run on the filesystem, and a
         workload characterizer. The results from the two separate parts
         can be combined to predict the performance of the filesystem on
         the workload. 

         The purpose for this separation of functionality is two-fold. First,
         many system designers would like their filesystem to perform well
         under diverse workloads: by characterizing the workload
         independently, the designers can better understand what is
         required of the filesystem. The micro-benchmarks tell the
         designer what needs to be improved while the workload
         characterizer tells the designer whether that improvement will
         affect filesystem performance under that workload. This
         separation also helps users trying to decide which system to run
         or buy, who may not be able to run their workload on all systems
         under consideration, and therefore need this separation. 

         The implementation of this methodology does not suffer from
         many of the problems seen in existing benchmarks: it scales with
         technology, it is tightly specified, and it helps system designers.
         This benchmark's only drawbacks are that it does not accurately
         predict the performance of a filesystem on a workload, thus
         limiting its applicability: it is useful to system designers, but not
         for users trying to decide which system to buy. The belief is that
         the general approach will work, given additional time to
         manipulate the prediction algorithm. 

ftp://deas-ftp.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-09-95.ps.gz

TR-09-95 [tr-09-95.ps.gz (77 K)]
     J. Bradley Chen, Yasuhiro Endo, Kee Chan, David Mazieres, Antonio Dias,
     Margo Seltzer, and Michael Smith. 1995. ``The Impact of Operating System
     Structure on Personal Computer Performance.'' 

         This paper presents a comparative study of the performance of
         three operating systems that run on the personal computer
         architecture derived from the IBM-PC. The operating systems,
         Windows for Workgroups (tm), Windows NT (tm), and NetBSD (a
         freely available UNIX (tm) variant) cover a broad range of system
         functionality and user requirements, from a single address space
         model to full protection with preemptive multitasking. Our
         measurements were enabled by hardware counters in Intel's
         Pentium (tm) processor that permit measurement of a broad
         range of processor events including instruction counts and
         on-chip cache miss rates. We used both microbenchmarks, which
         expose specific differences between the systems, and application
         workloads, which provide an indication of expected end-to-end
         performance. Our microbenchmark results show that accessing
         system functionality is more expensive in Windows than in the
         other two systems due to frequent changes in machine mode and
         the use of system call hooks. When running native applications,
         Windows NT is more efficient than Windows, but it does incur
         overhead from its microkernel structure. Overall, system
         functionality can be accessed most efficiently in NetBSD; we
         attribute this to its monolithic structure, and to the absence of the
         complications created by backwards compatibility in the other sys
         tems. Measurements of application performance show that the
         impact of these differences is significant in terms of overall
         execution time.

-- 
Matt Thomas               Internet:   matt@3am-software.com
3am Software Foundry      WWW URL:    http://www.3am-software.com/bio/matt.html
Westford, MA              Disclaimer: I disavow all knowledge of this message