kernel benchmarking

Over the past couple of days I have compiled some kernels on my Slack-box. It seems like quite a powerful way of configuring the system - I mean, I have taken out lots of stuff that I don't need like support for file systems, hardware devices and network protocols that I don't use and built in support for my USB devices and my sound card leaving me with a Linux kernel that works just the way I want.

I need to dream up some good ways of benchmarking these kernels to see what effects I am having on their performace.

Any ideas on benchmarking guys?

christo

Benchmarking the kernel alone is a hard task imho. the kernel supplies so many functions...

you could use the profiler that comes with "gcc" to test execution speed of all kernel functions. (maybe this needs a debug kernel which is slower anyway, but then you can still compare the default settings with debug options and the custom settings with the same)

you are probably better off using a standard benchmark to compare doing standard tasks with a default kernel compared to a custom kernel.

this looks promising too:

http://www.google.de/search?q=linux+kernel+benchmark

after you did, could you please post your results? i think this is an interesting issue for many linux users