Mark Wong posted a series of benchmark results from Rusty Russell's Hackbench. Rusty describes Hackbench as a minimized 'chat benchmark' that doesn't use threads or semaphores. The benchmark launches groups of processes that each listen on a given socket, and complimentary groups of processes that write 100 messages to each of the listening sockets, measuring the time this takes. This process is repeated multiple times with an increasing number of groups of processes, therby measuring the scalability of the scheduler with an increasing number of processes.

Mark's results begin with the 2.5.28 development kernel and continue up through the current 2.6.0-test5 kernel. In a second email he also offers results of the -mm tree, beginning with 2.5.66-mm1 and continuing up through 2.6.0-test5-mm2. Andrew Morton [interview] glanced at the results and commented that they looked "great, but tragically incomprehensible", going on to ask for an explanation, "do we rock or do we suck?". Mark replied, "the general trend in the metric indicates everything has been improving, so I think we rock."