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Libc mem* benchmarks

This framework has been designed to evaluate and compare relative performance of memory function implementations on a particular host.

It will also be use to track implementations performances over time.

Quick start

Setup

Python 2 being deprecated it is advised to used Python 3.

Then make sure to have matplotlib, scipy and numpy setup correctly:

apt-get install python3-pip
pip3 install matplotlib scipy numpy

To get good reproducibility it is important to make sure that the system runs in performance mode. This is achieved by running:

cpupower frequency-set --governor performance

Run and display `memcpy` benchmark

The following commands will run the benchmark and display a 95 percentile confidence interval curve of time per copied bytes. It also features host informations and benchmarking configuration.

cd llvm-project
cmake -B/tmp/build -Sllvm -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS=libc -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -C /tmp/build -j display-libc-memcpy-benchmark-small

Benchmarking regimes

Using a profiler to observe size distributions for calls into libc functions, it was found most operations act on a small number of bytes.

Function	% of calls with size ≤ 128	% of calls with size ≤ 1024
memcpy	96%	99%
memset	91%	99.9%
memcmp¹	99.5%	~100%

Benchmarking configurations come in two flavors:

small
- Exercises sizes up to 1KiB, representative of normal usage
- The data is kept in the L1 cache to prevent measuring the memory subsystem
big
- Exercises sizes up to 32MiB to test large operations
- Caching effects can show up here which prevents comparing different hosts

¹ - The size refers to the size of the buffers to compare and not the number of bytes until the first difference.

Benchmarking targets

The benchmarking process occurs in two steps:

Benchmark the functions and produce a json file
Display (or renders) the json file

Targets are of the form <action>-libc-<function>-benchmark-<configuration>

action is one of :
- run, runs the benchmark and writes the json file
- display, displays the graph on screen
- render, renders the graph on disk as a png file
function is one of : memcpy, memcmp, memset
configuration is one of : small, big

Superposing curves

It is possible to merge several json files into a single graph. This is useful to compare implementations.

In the following example we superpose the curves for memcpy, memset and memcmp:

> make -C /tmp/build run-libc-memcpy-benchmark-small run-libc-memcmp-benchmark-small run-libc-memset-benchmark-small
> python libc/utils/benchmarks/render.py3 /tmp/last-libc-memcpy-benchmark-small.json /tmp/last-libc-memcmp-benchmark-small.json /tmp/last-libc-memset-benchmark-small.json

Useful `render.py3` flags

To save the produced graph --output=/tmp/benchmark_curve.png.
To prevent the graph from appearing on the screen --headless.

Under the hood

To learn more about the design decisions behind the benchmarking framework, have a look at the RATIONALE.md file.

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