Today we are going to read from the WRL Research report "Why aren't operating systems getting faster with hardware ?" WRL research laboratory tests their ideas by designing, building, and using real systems. This paper was written in 1989. It evaluated several hardware platforms and operating systems using a set of benchmarks that test memory bandwidth and various operating system features such as kernel entry/exit and file systems. The benchmarks are mostly micro-benchmarks in the sense that each one measured a particular hardware or operating system feature. Such benchmarks can suggest the strength and weaknesses of a system but not indicate how good a system is. However, one benchmark was used to assess the overall speed of the operating system by testing a variety of file system features. The author finds that the different hardware platforms show significant speedup but the operating system performance of RISC workstations does not keep up. The benchmarks that were used in this study suggested two possible factors - one was the memory bandwidth that did not seem to scale to the processor speed and the second is the file system, some of which require synchronous disk I/Os in common situations.Here the processor gets faster but the disks don't. The hardware platforms used for the benchmarks include an abbreviation for each platform, an approximate MIPS rating, and an indication of whether the machine is based on RISC or CISC  processors.  The hardware used were MIPS M2000 (M2000), DEC station 3100 (DS3100), Sun-4/280 (Sun4), VAX 8800 (8800), Sun-3/75 (Sun3) and Microvax II (MVAX2). The first three are RISC machines and the next three are CISC machines.The operating systems used were Ultrix, SunOS, RISC/os and Sprite. Ultrix and SunOS are the DEC and Sun derivatives of Berkeley's 4.2 BSD Unix.  RISC/os was developed for the M2000 and Sprite was an experimental operating system at UC Berkeley. Some of the differences between SunOS 4.0 and 3.5 used with the Sun machines included a major restructuring of  the virtual memory system and file system. With these operating systems and hardware, a set of benchmarks were studied - the first of which was the kernel entry or exit. This measures the cost of entering and leaving the operating system kernel. It does this by repeatedly invoking the getpid kernel call which returns the callers process identifier. The average time for this benchmark ranged from 18 microseconds on M2000 to 207 microseconds on MVAX2. The Sun machines also showed higher average time than DS3100 and 8800. The hardware performance was also expressed in a number relative to their MIPS rating by taking the ratio of the Sun3 time to the particular machine's time and dividing that by the ratio of the machine's MIP rating to the Sun 3's MIPS rating.