Bionic Benchmarks
[TOC]
libc benchmarks (bionic-benchmarks)
bionic-benchmarks is a command line tool for measuring the runtimes of libc functions. It is built
on top of Google Benchmark with some additions to organize
tests into suites.
Device benchmarks
$ mmma bionic/benchmarks
$ adb root
$ adb sync data
$ adb shell /data/benchmarktest/bionic-benchmarks/bionic-benchmarks
$ adb shell /data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks/bionic-benchmarks
By default, bionic-benchmarks runs all of the benchmarks in alphabetical order. Pass
--benchmark_filter=getpid to run just the benchmarks with "getpid" in their name.
Host benchmarks
See the benchmarks/run-on-host.sh script. The host benchmarks can be run with 32-bit or 64-bit
Bionic, or the host glibc.
XML suites
Suites are stored in the suites/ directory and can be chosen with the command line flag
--bionic_xml.
To choose a specific XML file, use the --bionic_xml=FILE.XML option. By default, this option
searches for the XML file in the suites/ directory. If it doesn't exist in that directory, then
the file will be found as relative to the current directory. If the option specifies the full path
to an XML file such as /data/nativetest/suites/example.xml, it will be used as-is.
If no XML file is specified through the command-line option, the default is to use suites/full.xml.
However, for the host bionic benchmarks (bionic-benchmarks-glibc), the default is to use
suites/host.xml.
XML suite format
The format for a benchmark is:
<fn>
<name>BM_sample_benchmark</name>
<cpu><optional_cpu_to_lock></cpu>
<iterations><optional_iterations_to_run></iterations>
<args><space separated list of function args|shorthand></args>
</fn>
XML-specified values for iterations and cpu take precedence over those specified via command line
(via --bionic_iterations and --bionic_cpu, respectively.)
To make small changes in runs, you can also schedule benchmarks by passing in their name and a
space-separated list of arguments via the --bionic_extra command line flag, e.g.
--bionic_extra="BM_string_memcpy AT_COMMON_SIZES" or --bionic_extra="BM_string_memcmp 32 8 8"
Note that benchmarks will run normally if extra arguments are passed in, and it will fail with a segfault if too few are passed in.
Shorthand
For the sake of brevity, multiple runs can be scheduled in one XML element by putting one of the following in the args field:
NUM_PROPS
MATH_COMMON
AT_ALIGNED_<ONE|TWO>BUF
AT_<any power of two between 2 and 16384>_ALIGNED_<ONE|TWO>BUF
AT_COMMON_SIZES
Definitions for these can be found in bionic_benchmarks.cpp, and example usages can be found in the suites directory.
Unit Tests
bionic-benchmarks also has its own set of unit tests, which can be run from the binary in
/data/nativetest[64]/bionic-benchmarks-tests
Process startup time (bionic-spawn-benchmarks)
The spawn/ subdirectory has a few benchmarks measuring the time used to start simple programs
(e.g. Toybox's true and sh -c true). Run it on a device like so:
m bionic-spawn-benchmarks
adb root
adb sync data
adb shell /data/benchmarktest/bionic-spawn-benchmarks/bionic-spawn-benchmarks
adb shell /data/benchmarktest64/bionic-spawn-benchmarks/bionic-spawn-benchmarks
Google Benchmark reports both a real-time figure ("Time") and a CPU usage figure. For these
benchmarks, the CPU measurement only counts time spent in the thread calling posix_spawn, not that
spent in the spawned process. The real-time is probably more useful, and it is the figure used to
determine the iteration count.
Locking the CPU frequency seems to improve the results of these benchmarks significantly, and it reduces variability.
Google Benchmark notes
Repetitions
Google Benchmark uses two settings to control how many times to run each benchmark, "iterations" and "repetitions". By default, the repetition count is one. Google Benchmark runs the benchmark a few times to determine a sufficiently-large iteration count.
Google Benchmark can optionally run a benchmark run repeatedly and report statistics (median, mean,
standard deviation) for the runs. To do so, pass the --benchmark_repetitions option, e.g.:
# ./bionic-benchmarks --benchmark_filter=BM_stdlib_strtoll --benchmark_repetitions=4
...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BM_stdlib_strtoll 27.7 ns 27.7 ns 25290525
BM_stdlib_strtoll 27.7 ns 27.7 ns 25290525
BM_stdlib_strtoll 27.7 ns 27.7 ns 25290525
BM_stdlib_strtoll 27.8 ns 27.7 ns 25290525
BM_stdlib_strtoll_mean 27.7 ns 27.7 ns 4
BM_stdlib_strtoll_median 27.7 ns 27.7 ns 4
BM_stdlib_strtoll_stddev 0.023 ns 0.023 ns 4
There are 4 runs, each with 25290525 iterations. Measurements for the individual runs can be suppressed if they aren't needed:
# ./bionic-benchmarks --benchmark_filter=BM_stdlib_strtoll --benchmark_repetitions=4 --benchmark_report_aggregates_only
...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BM_stdlib_strtoll_mean 27.8 ns 27.7 ns 4
BM_stdlib_strtoll_median 27.7 ns 27.7 ns 4
BM_stdlib_strtoll_stddev 0.043 ns 0.043 ns 4
CPU frequencies
To get consistent results between runs, it can sometimes be helpful to restrict a benchmark to specific cores, or to lock cores at specific frequencies. Some phones have a big.LITTLE core setup, or at least allow some cores to run at higher frequencies than others.
A core can be selected for bionic-benchmarks using the --bionic_cpu option or using the
taskset utility. e.g. A Pixel 3 device has 4 Kryo 385 Silver cores followed by 4 Gold cores:
blueline:/ # /data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks/bionic-benchmarks --benchmark_filter=BM_stdlib_strtoll --bionic_cpu=0
...
------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
------------------------------------------------------------
BM_stdlib_strtoll 64.2 ns 63.6 ns 11017493
blueline:/ # /data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks/bionic-benchmarks --benchmark_filter=BM_stdlib_strtoll --bionic_cpu=4
...
------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
------------------------------------------------------------
BM_stdlib_strtoll 21.8 ns 21.7 ns 33167103
A similar result can be achieved using taskset. The first parameter is a bitmask of core numbers
to pass to sched_setaffinity:
blueline:/ # taskset f /data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks/bionic-benchmarks --benchmark_filter=BM_stdlib_strtoll
...
------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
------------------------------------------------------------
BM_stdlib_strtoll 64.3 ns 63.6 ns 10998697
blueline:/ # taskset f0 /data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks/bionic-benchmarks --benchmark_filter=BM_stdlib_strtoll
...
------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark Time CPU Iterations
------------------------------------------------------------
BM_stdlib_strtoll 21.3 ns 21.2 ns 33094801
To lock the CPU frequency, use the sysfs interface at /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/.
Changing the scaling governor to performance suppresses the warning that Google Benchmark
otherwise prints:
***WARNING*** CPU scaling is enabled, the benchmark real time measurements may be noisy and will incur extra overhead.
Some devices have a perf-setup.sh script that locks CPU and GPU frequencies. Some TradeFed
benchmarks appear to be using the script. For more information:
- run
get_build_var BOARD_PERFSETUP_SCRIPT - run
m perf-setupto install the script into${OUT}/data/local/tmp/perf-setup.sh - see: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/platform_testing/+/refs/heads/master/scripts/perf-setup/