Kernbench v0.41
What is this?
This is a cpu throughput benchmark originally devised and used by Martin J. Bligh. It is designed to compare kernels on the same machine, or to compare hardware. To compare hardware you need to be running the same architecture machines (eg i386), the same userspace binaries and run kernbench on the same kernel source tree.
It runs a kernel at various numbers of concurrent jobs: 1/2 number of cpus, optimal (default is 4xnumber of cpus) and maximal job count. Optionally it can also run single threaded. It then prints out a number of useful statistics for the average of each group of runs and logs them to kernbench.log
You need more than 2Gb of ram for this to be a true throughput benchmark or else you will get swapstorms.
Ideally it should be run in single user mode on a non-journalled filesystem. To compare results it should always be run in the same kernel tree.
How do I use it?
You need a kernel tree (any 2.6 will do) and the applications 'time', 'awk', 'date' and 'yes' installed. 'time' is different to the builtin time used by BASH and has more information desired for this benchmark.
Simply cd into the kernel tree directory and type
/path/to/kernbench
Options
kernbench [-n runs] [-o jobs] [-s] [-H] [-O] [-M] [-h] [-v]
n : number of times to perform benchmark (default 5)
o : number of jobs for optimal run (default 4 * cpu)
s : perform single threaded runs (default don't)
H : don't perform half load runs (default do)
O : don't perform optimal load runs (default do)
M : don't perform maximal load runs (default do)
f : fast run
h : print this help
v : print version number
- Changelog
- v0.41 Fixed make oldconfig
v0.40 Made all runs use the oldconfig if it exists. Changed to only do one
warmup run before all the benchmarks. Added logging to kernbench.log
Cleaned up the code substantially to reuse code where possible.
Added standard deviation statistics courtesy of Peter Williams
v0.30 Added fast run option which bypasses caching, warmup and tree
preparation and drops number of runs to 3. Modified half loads to
detect -j2 and change to -j3. Added syncs. Improved warnings and
messages.
v0.20 Change to average of runs, add options to choose which runs to perform
remove single threaded run from defaults, do warmup run, lots more
sanity checks, drop meaningless runs, add a few warnings, remove fudge
factor from no. of jobs.
v0.11 First public release
Thanks: M. Bligh for ideas. Others for help with magic incantations to get
BASH to work.
Con Kolivas <kernbench@kolivas.org>
Fri Apr 7 15:20:02 2006
- License
- GPL of course. Read COPYING included in this tarball.