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.

Note that we also build static benchmark binaries. They're useful for testing on devices running different versions of Android, or running non-Android OSes. Those binaries are called bionic-benchmarks-static instead. Copy from out/target/product/<device>/symbols/data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks-static instead of out/target/product/<device>/data/benchmarktest64/bionic-benchmarks-static if you want symbols for perf(1).

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 adb shell perf-setup.sh to execute the script, it is already by default be installed on device for eng and userdebug build
see: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/platform_testing/+/refs/heads/main/scripts/perf-setup/

Provide feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

Uh oh!