Re: Crusoe's performance on linux?

H. Peter Anvin
2003-06-26T03:25:35Z

Followup to: <3EF67AD4.4040601@thai.com>
By author: Samphan Raruenrom <samphan@thai.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Vojtech Pavlik wrote:
> > Could you a test just for me? Take vanilla 2.4.21 and then
> > make oldconfig; make dep; time make bzImage
> > That's basically what I want to know how long will take, since
> > it's one of the most common time consuming tasks the thing will
> > have to handle.
> Done! Here're the results:-
>
> Desktop - Pentium III 1 G Hz 754 MB -> 10.x min.
> Tablet PC - Crusoe TM5800 1 GHz 731 MB -> 17.x min.
>
> From freshdiagnos benchmack, the TPC has about 2x faster RAM.
> I use tmpfs for the whole process so disk speed didn't count.
> Both test run without X or any foreground process using
> 2.4.21-ac1 and RedHat kernel.
>

For what it's worth, we have been completely unable to reproduce these
kinds of results at Transmeta; our results are in fact very consistent
with the numbers reported by some people for the Sharp MM-10 "Kitty"
which is also a 1 GHz TM5800; all of them have been in the 10 minute
ballpark.

I have written a script to try to give a consistent compile benchmark;
however, one still needs to make sure that DMA is turned on (hdparm -d
/dev/hda); obviously, the compiler etc should not be on NFS.

The timed portion (make -j3 bzImage) part of this script takes
10m15.035s real time (user 9m10.890s, sys 0m43.350s) on my 1067 MHz
Crusoe prototype system (256MB SDR, 256MB DDR, ATA33 disk) -- don't
have TC1000 Tablet PC numbers yet, but I have asked someone to run it
-- running RedHat 9 including distro kernel and gcc 3.2.2. It
produced a bzImage file that's 1151608 bytes long when I ran it.

Note that it uses "make -j3" for the bzImage, and so aren't really
comparable to your times listed above.

You obviously need to point the KERNEL variable at a suitable copy of
linux-2.4.21.tar.gz. The script needs to run as root in order to
create the tmpfs.

-hpa
--
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