Our troubles with Linux and why you should care
Ashif S. Harji, Peter A. Buhr, Tim B. Brecht · 2011
Linux provides researchers with a full-fledged operating system that is widely used and open source. However, due to its complexity and rapid development, care should be exercised when using Linux for performance experiments, especially in systems research. The size and continual evolution of the Linux code-base makes it difficult to understand, and as a result, decipher and explain the reasons for performance improvements. In addition, the rapid kernel development cycle means that experimental results can be viewed as out of date, or meaningless, very quickly. We demonstrate that this viewpoint is incorrect because kernel changes can and have introduced both bugs and performance degradations.