On 4 July 2013 17:34, Siarhei Siamashka <siarhei.siamas...@gmail.com> wrote:

> For getting reproducible benchmark results, you just need to ensure
> that thermal throttling never kicks in. If the kernel is compiled
> with cpufreq stats enabled, you can compare these stats before/after
> your benchmark to ensure that it spent all the time running at the
> same designated clock frequency.
>

I did that on my Chromebook, put it on power mode and I get pretty
consistent build and benchmark times. It's an art to make sure the
benchmark run-time is enough to give you statistically relevant results
while not being too much to deal with overheating or scheduling issues, but
that, as you say, can be "fixed" by running on lower frequencies, I don't
mind about that.

What I really mind is to lower the frequency of our buildbots, the ones
that should be building and testing under 20 minutes (like octo-core i7s)
but take 3 hours to do so (on a dual Panda). While the comparison is in no
way fair, reducing the freq. will only make it worse. Coming from a server
farm culture, where noise, power and air-conditioning are always topped up
and never too expensive, it's hard not to giggle when hearing that you
should lower the frequency to get "expected results".

Yes, ARM devices were designed with the phone market in mind, but today
they're a lot more than that, and if they're to get into the server space,
they have to be consistent, even when cranked up all the way to 11.


Anyway, I recommend you to start the tests for the hardware
> robustness with:
>
>     wget https://raw.github.com/ssvb/cpuburn/master/cpuburn-a9.S
>     arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc -o cpuburn-a9 cpuburn-a9.S
>

I'll do that and report on my findings.

Thanks for the overall, it was very educational. ;)

cheers,
--renato
_______________________________________________
linaro-toolchain mailing list
linaro-toolchain@lists.linaro.org
http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain

Reply via email to