The Impact of Operating System Structure on Personal Computer Performance

The Impact of Operating System Structure on Personal Computer Performance
Toby Jackson
Abstract
The Impact of Operating System Structure on Personal Computer Performance
Toby Jackson
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 multi-tasking. 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.
1. Introduction
While most current operating systems research takes place using a variant of UNIX, the vast majority of main- stream computing occurs on personal computer (PC) systems (those derived from the IBM-PC architecture) running Microsoft Windows. The differences between the OS platforms used in research and

Bibliography: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Postscript Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mas- sachusetts, 1985. [Berners-Lee et al. 92] T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, J-F. Groff, and B. Pollermann. World-wide web: The information universe. Electronic Networking Research, Applications and Policy, Volume 2, Number 1, pages 52-58, 1992. Geoff Chappell, DOS Internals, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1994. Helen Custer, Inside Windows NT, Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 1993. Ray Duncan. Advanced MSDOS Programming. Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 1986. Ben Ezzell, “The Power Under the Hood; Preview: Windows NT,” PC Magazine, Volume 12, Number 11, June 15, 1993, pp 219-263. Gary Gunnerson, “Network Operating Systems: Playing The Odds,” PC Magazine, Volume 12, Number 18, October 26, 1993, pp 285-336. Intel Corporation, Pentium Family User’s Manual, Volume 3: Architecture and Programming Manual, Intel Corporation, 1994. Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman, The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD UNIX Operating System, Addison-Wesley, Read- ing, Massachusetts, 1989. David S. Linthicum, “Life After DOS,” PC Magazine, May 31, 1994, pages 203-237. [Linthicum & Vaughan-Nichols 93] David S. Linthicum and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “The Beast Turns Beauty; Unix on Intel,” PC Magazine, Volume 12, Number 11, June 15, 1993, pp 219-263. Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Windows Guide to Programming, Microsoft Press, Red- mond, Washington, 1990. Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Windows NT Resource Kit. Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 1993. John K. Ousterhout. Tcl and the Tk Toolkit. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1994. Matt Pietrek, Windows Internals, Addison-Wesley, Reading Massachusetts, 1993. Murray Sargent III and Richard L. Shoemaker, The IBM PC, Addison-Wesley, Reading Massa- chusetts, 1986. Andrew Schulman, David Maxey, and Matt Pietrek, Undocumented Windows, Addison-Wes- ley, Reading Massachusetts, 1992.