These benchmarks are designed to be used from within a benchmark framework like http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~mperes/ezbench/. A typical way to run them would be: $ ~/ezbench/ezbench.sh -p ./linux,git -m '' -b gem: -r 15 which executes the set of gem benchmarks, 15 times each, using HEAD of ./linux.git as the reference commit.