Kernel build measures the disk and i/o subsystems more than it does the
CPU. Thus kernel builds are more useless than dhrystones. I'm only
interested in measuring the raw CPU power, not the speed of the
SCSI disks.
I'm using the byte bench 2.0 benchmarks with default options, I don't
touch anything. It was compiled exactly the same on both the ppro/200 and
the K6.
People might claim dhrystones are "useless", but unfortunately it does
seem to be a good indicator of speed, despite what people claim.
E.g. we compared a pentium and a powerpc with dhrystones. People claimed
powerpc should be faster, but no matter what application we ran, it
wasn't. In fact, each application showed exactly the same speed as
dhrystone predicted.
So I don't listen to benchmark-critics any more.
-Dan