Linux Plumbers Conf 2009

Excerpt

Description

This set of real-time benchmarks was designed with the hopes of becoming an accepted industry standard micro-benchmark suite to compare many of the common metrics of real-time performance across several platforms and several languages (C, C++ and Java). This allows for a comprehensive look at how these metrics compare across the platform axis and the languages axis. Most benchmarks, until now, have been throughput oriented, which does not help promote the strengths of real-time Linux. This benchmark suite introduces many more latency benchmarks which give a better view of how much more deterministic real-time Linux is compared to standard Linux.

In addition to benchmarking these metrics, the benchmark suite can provide a great way to keep watch on kernel regressions and new bugs. By exercising the same kernel interfaces in a variety of ways with a variety of timings, we may be able to expose more kernel and glibc bugs. By adding the benchmark suite to an automated test server, such as test.kernel.org, we can keep an eye on the release-to-release performance of the real-time kernel.

While the real-time tests in the Linux Test Project (LTP) do cover some of the same things, one of the major goals of this RT benchmark suite was to have a set of benchmarks that could run in a variety of languages, with a common test harness.

Tags

real-time, benchmark, testing, regression

Speaker

• 

  Vernon Mauery

  IBM
  • Website: http://vernon.mauery.com/

  Biography

  Vernon Mauery has been working for IBM in the Linux Technology Center since 2003. He has worked in xSeries Enablement (getting Linux to run on IBM x86 servers) and more recently on the Real-Time Linux team, supporting kernel development and working with other people in the community to get a more deterministic kernel.