Epic regression in throughput since v2.6.23

From: Serge Belyshev
Date: Tue Sep 08 2009 - 09:18:54 EST



Hi. I've done measurments of time taken by make -j4 kernel build
on a quadcore box. Results are interesting: mainline kernel
has regressed since v2.6.23 release by more than 10%.

The following graph is time taken by "make -j4" (median over 9 runs)
versus kernel version. The huge (10%) regressions since v2.6.23 is
apparent. Note that tip/master c26f010 is better than current mainline.
Also note that BFS is significantly better than both and shows the same
throughput as vanilla v2.6.23:

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7029/epicmakej4.png


The following plot is a detailed comparison of time taken versus number
of parallel jobs. Note that at "make -j4" (which equals number of hardware
threads), BFS has the minimum (best performance),
and tip/master -- maximum (worst). I've also tested mainline v2.6.31
(not shown on the graph) which produces similar, albeit a bit slower,
results as the tip/master.

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/5335/epicbfstip.png


Conclusion are
1) mainline has severely regressed since v2.6.23
2) BFS shows optimal performance at make -jN where N equals number of
h/w threads, while current mainline scheduler performance is far from
optimal in this case.
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