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A First Look at KSOS-32 Performance
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Tom Perrine
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Operating Systems Division
San Diego CA
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May 3 1987
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.sh 1 "Introduction"
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This report will discuss the performance of KSOS-32, compared with
4.2BSD UNIX running on the same hardware.  Specifically, differences
in CPU-bound process performance, file system operations, and process
creation speeds will be analyzed and explained. Suggestions for
performance enhancements will be presented with approximations of
expected performance gains.

.sh 1 "Background"
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As of mid-April, 1988, the KSOS-32 Security Kernel was fully
functional on VAX-11/780 hardware. As this was a significant milestone
in the KSOS-32 project, a review was deemed necessary to adequately
assess the current state of the Kernel and to suggest where further
development effort (not currently funded) could produce the best
results. The primary goal of further KSOS-32 Kernel development would
be increased performance of the base system with some functional
enhancements for improved security, notably Access Control Lists.
This report is concerned only with the performance issues.
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KSOS-32 is essentially a port of KSOS-11 to VAX hardware. KSOS-11
currently runs on DEC PDP-11/70 systems. The performance of KSOS-11
is described in [Perr84].
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The current state of KSOS-32 is very similar to the very first release
of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX for the VAX (3 BSD),
especially in the following areas. KSOS-32 does not yet take full
advantage of the virtual memory architecture of the VAX hardware, e.g.
it does not page. KSOS-32 still has a file system based on Version 6
UNIX, BSD UNIX was based on a Version 7 UNIX file system until
recently (4.1c or 4.2 BSD in 1981). The Version 6 and Version 7 UNIX
file systems are almost identical in structure and performance.
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This similarity between 3 BSD UNIX and KSOS-32 will be explored
further in the Summary section. In this report, whenever the term UNIX
is alone used, it refers to version 4.2 BSD UNIX, as distributed by Berkeley.
