the choice of some of these benchmarks is weird. they have a bunch of cpu-bound benchmarks. why exactly would you expect these to change as the kernel changed?

the choice of some of these benchmarks is weird. they have a bunch of cpu-bound benchmarks. why exactly would you expect these to change as the kernel changed? Scheduling is a non-trivial task, and the kernel scheduler underwent significant work during 2.4 and early 2.6. I think the reason those graphs are so boring is because the tests involve single process/single thread benchmarking.