Hi Stefan,

Hi Chris, On Wed, May 06, 2020 at 01:23:59PM +0200, Chris Hofer wrote:

Hi,

to measure the performance overhead of the Armv8 Genode VMM, I ran some benchmarks (cyclictest and lmbench). I compared it against a native Linux installation on the Imx8-evk board (same kernel version). For some measurements (for example fork + executing /bin/sh from lmbench), I observe counter-intuitive results in the sense that the virtualized version runs *faster* than the native one (Vm 1,1ms vs. native 2,5ms).

My understanding is, that the virtual timer offset (cntvoff_el2) is not used and thus, the guest sees wall clock time. I would expect that the virtualization incurs an overhead and this overhead manifests itself in longer (wall clock) time measurements.

...

Correct, but you assume that native Linux and virtualized version run with the same frequencies (cpu + timer) - don't you?

Actually, I think the timer frequency should be constant in both scenarios, whereby at least the cpu will be controlled dynamically in the native Linux case.

When comparing such complex scenarios to avoid mistakes I would strongly encourage you to not measure time on-target. It often leads to wrong assumptions. It is better to measure long-term scenarios from another host. If you need to measure micro-benchmarks, you might loop the operation quite often and measure the whole time-span outside, and divide the result.

Alternatively, if you insist to measure on-target, you can instrument Linux to use a constant CPU frequency (google for "linux cpu governor"). Moreover, you might check whether the timer frequency is the same in both settings (CNTFRQ_EL0) - well it should be.

Thank you for this advice; it makes perfect sense to capture the time off-target.

I finally found a big mistake in my setup to measure the duration of forking a process and calling /bin/sh. The native installation uses a dynamically linked shell and the guest has a statically linked binary. After using statically linked binaries on both systems I get reasonable results.

Nevertheless, I will take advice and verify the measurements off-target.

Best,

Chris