Macrobenchmark: Kernel Compilation

Table: Linux Kernel Build Macrobenchmarks, time in seconds

			% Overhead
Machine Type	2.5.15	2.5.15-lsm	with LSM
4 CPUs	92	92	0%
1 CPU	341	342	0.3%

Our first macrobenchmark is the widely used kernel compilation benchmark, measuring the time to build the Linux kernel. We ran this test on a 4-processor SMP machine (four 700 MHz Xeon processors, 1 GB RAM, ultra wide SCSI disk) using both a SMP and UP kernel.

The single processor test executed the command time make -j2 bzImage and the 4-processor test executed the command time make -j8 bzImage, with the results shown in Table 4. The result is basically zero overhead for the LSM patch, the worst case being 0.3%.