Linux/Unix nbench

This page mirrors the original site at www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html

This page is about my port to Linux/Unix of release 2 of BYTE Magazine's BYTEmark benchmark program (previously known as BYTE's Native Mode Benchmarks). These are Native Mode (a.k.a. Algorithm Level) tests; benchmarks designed to expose the capabilities of a system's CPU, FPU, and memory system. Read all about it at BYTE's benchmark page.

The benchmark program takes less than 10 minutes to run (on most machines) and compares the system it is run on to two benchmark systems (a Dell Pentium 90 with 256 KB cache running MSDOS and an AMD K6/233 with 512 KB cache running Linux). The archive contains the complete source, documentation, and a binary (Linux elf). The source has been successfully compiled on various operating systems, including SunOS, DEC Unix 4.0, DEC OSF1, HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, MS-DOS, and of course Linux.

nbench-byte-2.1.lsm (using http to retrieve)
nbench-byte-2.1.lsm (using ftp to retrieve)

nbench-byte-2.1.tar.gz (using http to retrieve)
nbench-byte-2.1.tar.gz (using ftp to retrieve)

If you run this benchmark then you can mail me your results for posting (see the file README.submit in the archive) at

Uwe F. Mayer (mayer@tux.org)

There are quite a few results already. However, if you have run the test, then by all means send me your results. Submitted results will be posted. If you use MkLinux then please tell me in your submission whether you use libmoto or not. Also tell me if you do anything fancy, like overclocking your CPU, for example.

Pentium 90 baseline: Summary of results with Linux 2.0.x and gcc 2.7.x.y

AMD K6/233 baseline: All itemized results

There also is a comparison of running the benchmark with different compilers and operating systems on the same hardware.

Compiler/OS influences

Finally, here is a message for all Digital Unix users on how to figure out what version you are using, and also a message for IRIX users about compiler flags.

Back to the linux page.

First posted: 12/16/96
Last updated: Sun May 16 17:18:51 MET DST 1999