An analysis of performance evolution of Linux's core operations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of how Linux's performance has evolved over the past seven years. Unlike recent works that focus on OS performance in terms of scalability or service of a particular workload, this study goes back to basics: the latency of core kernel operations (e.g., system calls, context switching, etc.). To our surprise, the study shows that the performance of many core operations has worsened or fluctuated significantly over the years. For example, the select system call is 100% slower than it was just two years ago. An in-depth analysis shows that over the past seven years, core kernel subsystems have been forced to accommodate an increasing number of security enhancements and new features. These additions steadily add overhead to core kernel operations but also frequently introduce extreme slowdowns of more than 100%. In addition, simple misconfigurations have also severely impacted kernel performance. Overall, we find most of the slowdowns can be attributed to 11 changes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it