OpenWrt / MIPS benchmark with MGLRU

[Yu Zhao]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 10:17 PM Yu Zhao <yuzhao at google.com> wrote:
>
> TLDR
> ====
> RAM utilization  Throughput (95% CI)  P99 Latency (95% CI)
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> ~90%             NS                   NS
> ~110%            +[12, 16]%           -[20, 22]%
>
> Abbreviations
> =============
> CI:   confidence interval
> NS:   no statistically significant difference
> DUT:  device under test
> ATE:  automatic test equipment
>
> Rational
> ========
> 1. OpenWrt is the most popular distro for WiFi routers; many of its
>    targets use big endianness [1].
> 2. 4 out of the top 5 bestselling WiFi routers in the US use MIPS [2];
>    MIPS uses software-managed TLB.
> 3. Memcached is the best available memory benchmark on OpenWrt;
>    admittedly such a use case is very limited in the real world.

Thanks.

My goal is to encourage MM people to extend their test coverage to
some commonly used but less tested configurations. I carefully
constructed this benchmark with the balance between its
representativeness and the effort to reproduce.

When I wear my MM hat, I see ER-8 as the ideal choice because it comes
with a serial port, a replaceable memory DIMM and one of the two cores
that can be disabled. The same SoC is also what the Debian MIPS port
mainly uses for their testing [1]. So if I need help, I might be able
to get it from them.

>From OpenWrt's / MIPS OEMs' POVs, I do see ER-8 as an uninteresting
platform. Currently the best selling WiFi router on Amazon US is
Archer A7, a knockoff of Archer C7. The latter comes with not only the
serial port header but also the JTAG header, and that's what I use.
But I seriously doubt showing how I work on C7 would encourage MM
people to try it. I snapped a pictures of it during lunch:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rYBwLOyMqBSr6WKUZd7Gbf9RfwA641X5/
And other boards I routinely test the MM performance on:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yBMx9OPWw-5czvz3maNUy6WBFwPvAqG5/
All the way dates back to this vintage:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12N21qiWSoyJgZwVkwAhY8_5Fj4dKftqD/

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/MIPSPort