Kim Horne, who had earlier found the MacBook better than the Powerbook in running Eclipse, tells us that the performance tests on Mac OS X weren’t smooth.

Getting the performance tests to run has required a bit more ‘jiggerpokery’ than she has hoped for. Out-of-the-box performance test frameworks do not run on the OS X (Intel or otherwise) due to several reported bugs. Kim says that each should have a straightforward fix as the hacks have been quite easy.

The bugs Kim has found so far include:

• Bug 147513 – runtests[.bat] does not rake into account the existence of x86 Macs. This was hacked to work by adding a new OR statement for macosx-carbon-x86 that allows the script to proceed.
• Bug 147519  – Performance tests on OS X need additional VM parameters. This was hacked to work by adding a new line to test.xml that sets the <code>extraVMargs</code> property to -XstartOnFirstThread.
• Bug 147520  – runtimeArchive property is not set for Intel Macs. This was hacked to work by adding a new <condition> element for macosx-carbon-x86.

However, Kim adds that the tests appear to be running fine on her G4 Powerbook, but the results are incoherent. She expects to get clear results from both machines soon. Watch this space for updates.