The Interaction of Architecture and Operating System Design (1991)
Thomas Anderson

RISC chips have been designed with application -- not operating system
-- performance in mind.  The result of this is that operating system
performance is well below application code performance on contemporary
RISCs.  Both chips and OSs need to take steps to improve this
situation.

Interestingly, this paper uses microkernels as its prime motivation
(e.g., Mach) and they have come and gone from vogue.  Their essential
point survives, however, because systems are composed of many
applications frequently communicating and entering and leaving the
kernel, operations which the authors analyze.  The authors test a null
system call, traps, page table entry change, and context switching.
Their Table 1 is confusing.  For 

@inproceedings{ thomas91interaction,
    author = "Anderson, Thomas E. and Levy, Henry M. and Bershad, Brian N. and Lazowska, Edward D.",
    title = "The Interaction of Architecture and Operating System Design",
    booktitle = "{ASPLOS}, International Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems",
    address = "Santa Clara, CA {(USA)}",
    pages = "108--120",
    year = "1991",
 }