> As often as not, I use lmbench to act as a sythetic workload for profiling,
> and practically ignore the results of the benchmark run.  Lmbench is
> indeed a wonderful tool, but is kind of like a screwdriver -- it doesn't
> pound nails well, but it is excellent at what it does well :-).

I like lmbench.  It helps us profile the kernel, it helped us to point
out which areas were weak on the kernel port compared to already
available operating systems on the sparc.  It is also interesting to
see that Solaris nowadays is faster than SunOS in most of the
benchmarks.  

Yes, it is a tool, and we like to use it to see how bad we are doing.
We also use bonnie and crashme on a regular basis on our kernels.  If
you could point us to other tools to profile our system or to find
weak spots in our kernel implementation we are very interested in
getting our hands on those.  

I understand that you have worked on that a lot while you were
enhancing FreeBSD.

Miguel.