Operating System Measurements for x64 machines running Linux

Measuring some key system parameters for Linux systems running on Intel x64 hardware. We use a low-overhead method of measuring time using the rdtsc instruction to read the CPU's internal clock that contains a monotonically increasing value, running at the specified base frequency of the CPU. The experimental methodology for many of the experiments is heavily inspired by LMBench, and we use the methodology decribed in Gabriele Paoloni's 2010 white paper for our execution time measurements.

CPU and System Benchmarks

1. Process and thread creation time
2. Process and thread context switching overheads
3. Syscall and procedure call overheads

Memory Benchmarks

1. RAM Access Time
2. RAM bandwidth
3. Page fault time (hard page fault)

Network benchmarks

1. Peak network bandwidth
2. Round-trip time
3. TCP Connection setup and teardown time

File System Benchmarks

1. File cache size measurement
2. File read benchmark (local and remote via NFS)

Prerequisites

First ensure that the CPU is running Intel Pstate drivers

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_driver

intel_pstate
....

Then, ensure that dynamic CPU frequency scaling (a.k.a Turbo Boost) is switched off (note that this change does not persist across reboots)

sudo echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

Build Instructions

Build the benchmarks individually using

mkdir bin
make -C <benchmark_folder> all

benchmark_folder can be either cpu_benchmarks, mem_benchmarks, nw_benchmarks or fs_benchmarks based on the benchmark you want to run

Use the clean target to clean up the binary files after finishing the execution

Benchmarks

CPU Operations

Run the binary file to get the average and standard deviation of time measurements using

sudo taskset -c 1 ./bin/<binary name> 

sudo is important as nice commands to set the priority requires root user privileges

Memory Operations

Warning: You will need atleast 8GB of free disk space to use the temp files that are used for these benchmarks

Run the binary file to get the average and standard deviation of time measurements using

sudo taskset -c 1 ./bin/<binary name> 

NOTE: For page fault time, you can run the helper script in the scripts/ directory using

sudo python3 scripts/runpagefault.py

For memory access time benchmark run:

sudo ./scripts/runmemaccess.sh

Network Benchmarks

Change the server IP in netconfig.h before building

Run the binary to get the measurements using

sudo taskset -c 1 ./bin/<binary name> 

File System Benchmarks

Warning: You will need atleast 16GB of free disk space to use the temp files that are used for these benchmarks Also, modify the mount point in remote_fileread.cpp for the remote file read tests before building

Run the binary to get the measurements as above NOTE: For FS contention, you can run the helper script in the scripts/ directory using

sudo ./scripts/runcontention.sh