[parisc-linux] Performance

[parisc-linux] Performance

[T. Martin]

 Hello, 
  I know this is off topic for the kernel but I'd like to say a little. 

 I have a 715/50 and it's been churning along with HP-UX 9.0 (not Y2K so
HP says) It's been running setiathome as is a P166 Intel and I'm actually
impressed by the math power of that 50mhz chip it outpermes the P166 about
3% . 
 Just thought a few would like to know.

 One other thing I got a 715/75 and it's framebuffer is not 1024x768 as is
the 715/50 any suggestions as to what it might be. 
Thanks 
Terry

Re: [parisc-linux] Performance

[Michael Shalayeff]

Making, drinking tea and reading an opus magnum from T. Martin:
>  Hello, 
>   I know this is off topic for the kernel but I'd like to say a little. 
> 
>  I have a 715/50 and it's been churning along with HP-UX 9.0 (not Y2K so
> HP says) It's been running setiathome as is a P166 Intel and I'm actually
> impressed by the math power of that 50mhz chip it outpermes the P166 about
> 3% . 
>  Just thought a few would like to know.
> 
>  One other thing I got a 715/75 and it's framebuffer is not 1024x768 as is
> the 715/50 any suggestions as to what it might be. 
1280x1024 (;
or maybe just some other vsync freq?
cu

-- 
    paranoic mickey       (my employers have changed but, the name has remained)

Re: [parisc-linux] Performance

[Steve Shack]

Michael Shalayeff wrote:

> Making, drinking tea and reading an opus magnum from T. Martin:
> >  Hello,
> >   I know this is off topic for the kernel but I'd like to say a little.
> >
> >  I have a 715/50 and it's been churning along with HP-UX 9.0 (not Y2K so
> > HP says) It's been running setiathome as is a P166 Intel and I'm actually
> > impressed by the math power of that 50mhz chip it outpermes the P166 about
> > 3% .
> >  Just thought a few would like to know.
> >
> >  One other thing I got a 715/75 and it's framebuffer is not 1024x768 as is
> > the 715/50 any suggestions as to what it might be.
> 1280x1024 (;
> or maybe just some other vsync freq?
> cu

Some of the puffins helped me out on this when I first got my 712. If you press tab
while booting up it will cycle through the videomodes.
It might not work on a 715 i'm not sure. But if it does cycle through untill you
find a usable videomode. (many were there but very fuzzy, in the end 1024x768 was
the ONLY one that worked even half way decent.)

[parisc-linux] performance

[Alex deVries]

I stumbled on this:
http://www.spec.org/osg/web99/results/res2000q4/

This shows some PA-RISC machines running HPUX performing reasonably
well.

What would it take to get parisc-linux to perform similiarly to HPUX for
these kinds of numbers?  Showing that these kinds of numbers are
possible for parisc-linux would certainly help in our quest to have real
users.


- Alex

-- 
Alex deVries, Principal Solutions Architect, The Puffins at Linuxcare
613.562.2759 tel
alex@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare, Support for the revolution.

Re: [parisc-linux] performance

[Grant Grundler]

Alex deVries wrote:
> I stumbled on this:
> http://www.spec.org/osg/web99/results/res2000q4/
> 
> This shows some PA-RISC machines running HPUX performing reasonably well.

HPUX11+Zeus on A500 posted the highest rated Specweb99 for single CPU machine.
Though the HP specweb folks didn't expect that to last very long...

Note that IBM Netfinity server nearly doubled in performance using
native OS+Zeus vs linux+Tux. I don't expect such a dramatic difference
for parisc-linux+Tux vs HPUX+Zeus.

> What would it take to get parisc-linux to perform similiarly to HPUX for
> these kinds of numbers?  Showing that these kinds of numbers are
> possible for parisc-linux would certainly help in our quest to have real
> users.

Offhand, I can think of several things (roughly in order):
o Tux (and/or zero copy - aka "Block I/O")
o support more than 512MB memory - preferably 8 or 16GB (64-bit kernel)
o Profile Based Optimization (compiler/linker)
o Write a module to dump CPU performance counters to /proc
  (and use output to tune critical code paths)
o handle 10 packets per interrupt under acenic
o Jumbo Frames?

I'm sure others (eg jsm) could add alot more here.

grant

Grant Grundler
Unix Systems Enablement Lab
+1.408.447.7253

Re: [parisc-linux] performance

[Alan Cox]

> http://www.spec.org/osg/web99/results/res2000q4/
> 
> This shows some PA-RISC machines running HPUX performing reasonably
> well.

Specweb is basically a con. Its not a materially valuable benchmark. It benches
how fast your irq handler path is, how fast your memory cache is, how good
your DMA transfers are. It has almost nothing to do with how good a web
server the box is.

> What would it take to get parisc-linux to perform similiarly to HPUX for
> these kinds of numbers?  Showing that these kinds of numbers are
> possible for parisc-linux would certainly help in our quest to have real
> users.

Basically it comes down to using DMA, caching everything and using the fact
it is a completely hoax benchmark to write custom tuned code for the job. 
Even the people who 'use xyz webserver' and it sounds standard turn out to 
be embedding it or half of it in the kernel.

So it comes down to - tuning the network card driver, tuning the IRQ path, 
making sure the cache handling is optimal. The rest consists of loading the
machine with 8Gbytes of RAM, using obscenely smart ethernet cards and having
good memory bandwidth.

The 64bit pa-risc boxes have the hardware for it, in fact they have better 
hardware for it than x86. All you have to do is write better tlb, irq and pci
handling code than the HP/UX engineering team 8).

Alan

Re: [parisc-linux] performance

[Alex deVries]

Alan Cox wrote:
> > http://www.spec.org/osg/web99/results/res2000q4/
> >
> > This shows some PA-RISC machines running HPUX performing reasonably
> > well.
> 
> Specweb is basically a con. Its not a materially valuable benchmark. It benches
> how fast your irq handler path is, how fast your memory cache is, how good
> your DMA transfers are. It has almost nothing to do with how good a web
> server the box is.

I agree that specweb might not actually be functionally practical.

This might not be the case with specweb, but sometimes specifications do
have the ability to influence customers regardless of their validity.

That's interesting for one reason: if the marketing helps make potential
customers think that parisc-linux is fast, they'll buy parisc boxes, and
HP is more likely to allocate developer time on this project.

- Alex

-- 
Alex deVries, Principal Solutions Architect, The Puffins at Linuxcare
613.562.2759 tel
alex@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare, Support for the revolution.

Re: [parisc-linux] performance

[Grant Grundler]

Alan,
Interesting comments. I had to think about them for a bit.

Alan Cox wrote:
> Specweb is basically a con. Its not a materially valuable benchmark.
> It benches how fast your irq handler path is, how fast your memory cache
> is, how good your DMA transfers are. It has almost nothing to do with how
> good a web server the box is.

At some level, all benchmarks are bogus. Bogomips encapsulates the issue.
Taking the benchmarks out of context is when the con game starts.
Isn't Specweb just one aspect of what makes a good webserver?
Others include cost, size, security, manageability, reliability, etc.
It just seems CPU/Memory/IO "bandwidth" and utilization (efficiency) are
valid things to measure. An outsiders perspective is Specweb attempts to
encapsulate those numbers with a representative workload.

Marketing drives most benchmarking I've been involved in.
And Marketing targets the more ignorant (but not too poor) customers. 
Smart (and rich) customers use specific benchmarks make a "short list"
and then measure *their* application performance.
HP has several "Capacity Planning Centers" just for those customers.

[ deleted comment about putting webserver in kernel ]

> So it comes down to - tuning the network card driver, tuning the IRQ path, 
> making sure the cache handling is optimal. The rest consists of loading the
> machine with 8Gbytes of RAM, using obscenely smart ethernet cards and having
> good memory bandwidth.
> 
> The 64bit pa-risc boxes have the hardware for it, in fact they have better 
> hardware for it than x86. All you have to do is write better tlb, irq and pci
> handling code than the HP/UX engineering team 8).

Given only a handful of people know the PARISC CPU/TLB as well as jsm,
and I (re)wrote the HPUX PCI code, I suggest long term performance
gains will be found in linux VM/PM (and other "architected" stuff like
atomic operations - which will always suck on parisc) and drivers.
(My definition of drivers includes networking stack and NIC device drivers).
Short term goal is to optimize existing parisc-specific code around
existing architecture.

[ /rant on ]
The HPUX engineering team is not lacking in talent - just opportunity to
make the zillions of small changes required to improve scalability and
reduce CPU utilization. Any single change resulting in less than 2%
performance improvement on something like SpecWeb is very hard to get
into HPUX kernel.
[ /rant off ]

grant

Re: [parisc-linux] performance

[Alan Cox]

> Given only a handful of people know the PARISC CPU/TLB as well as jsm,
> and I (re)wrote the HPUX PCI code, I suggest long term performance
> gains will be found in linux VM/PM (and other "architected" stuff like
> atomic operations - which will always suck on parisc) and drivers.
> (My definition of drivers includes networking stack and NIC device drivers).
> Short term goal is to optimize existing parisc-specific code around
> existing architecture.

Much of the work Ingo and others did concentrated on the eepro100 driver
internals down to removing every pci stall, doing irq affinity and doing small
optimisations on the networking stack.

So I'd say your suggestion matches what happened on x86 too. The atomic stuff
is trickier. Linux is designed to optimal on the common high performance 
hardware and right now the design therefore focuses on ia32 at the cost 
sometimes of other systems.

Alan