Some benchmark results

Hi,

I wanted to know how good or bad mainline vs RT is, therefore I let MMTests torture my laptop for a while. I selected a few of the supported benchmarks by MMTests in order to keep to a reasonable time frame.

The aim was to see the impact of normal (no RT) workloads with different preempt configurations on mainline and RT patched kernel. I tried to not to change other configuration flags except the preempt one. There are some small difference due to dependencies but the rest looks ok to me.

http://www.monom.org/rt/mmtests/

Suggestion, improvements, comments?

cheers,
daniel

Am Montag, 25. August 2014, 11:02:32 schrieb Daniel Wagner:

Hi Daniel,

I had a first look at the above mentioned page.

The thing I'am complety missing in the huge amount of numbers is: What is your demand, your primary topic to solve in or with RT?
And as I interprete the numbers: a RT kernel is a little bit more CPU-hungry then normal and this is nothing new.
---

Until now it's usual to characterize RT performance in terms of (missed) maximum latencies.

You define your specialized workload, run it with RT priorities and check if it fits its demands. BTW you can verify and document this over the lifetime of your hardware/software combination.
If misses happen it is mostly possible to track the problem down to the culprit piece of soft- or hardware. If so, an iteration process starts hopefully before real damage happens.

A measure to "stress" your workload in a conceptional phase is putting more or less unrelated software on your machine until you quasi saturate their ressources (I/O, interrupt, drivers, schedulers, CPU, memory, network). If your primary workload survives you'll get a much better feeling but still no guarantees.

Next is to understand and accept that certain parts even of a RT kernel are _not_ designed to guarantee limited latencies (memory allocation, disk-IO, suspend-resume comes to mind). If you trigger them in your RT task: back to start. If you trigger them elsewhere: perhaps it still works.

I hope this helps to understand the situation a little bit better. Nevertheless thanks for the patience to do and document all the tests.

Bernhard

Hi Bernhard,

Thanks looking at the numbers and the feedback from you. I really appreciate that.

To your question: My goal is to help out to get this patch set merged into mainline. I know an ambitious goal and I might be too incompetent (I may suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect. but hey, I am not the one who recognize this).

So I figured the best thing is to start playing with different loads and see how they compare to mainline and trying to understand why they are different.

Sure, I am well aware that RT is 'a little bit more CPU-hungry', but I wondered how much is a little and what are the effects of it?

I am doing those tests for myself to get a better understanding. I just shared the results in case someone else finds them interesting. I should have stated that more clearly to avoid burning time from you. Sorry about that.

cheers,
daniel
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rt-users" in the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html