SBC is a shortcut for single-board computer and this whole repository is about performance considerations around those devices (with an initial focus on energy efficient server tasks).
This small set of different CPU performance tests focuses on 'headless' operation only (no GPU/display stuff, no floating point number crunching). Unlike many other 'kitchen-sink benchmarks' it tries to produce insights instead of fancy graphs.
It has eight entirely different usage modes:
- Generate a rough CPU performance assessment for a specific SBC in general (under ideal conditions)
- Show whether an individual SBC is able to perform the same and if not hopefully answering the question 'why?'
- Help software developers and hardware designers to improve 'thermal performance' when using the
-tand/or-Tswitches (details/discussion, another example) - Graph thermal/consumption charts with
-gto measure efficiency of settings/devices - Generate a controlled environment with appropriate settings for other benchmark suites like Geekbench (
sbc-bench -G) or Phoronix (sbc-bench -P) sbc-bench -kshows kernel version info. Stuff like: still supported? BSP or mainline?- The review modes (
-rand-R) are designed to help reviewers and participants of 'SBC debug parties' to quickly identify tunables and bottlenecks that need further attention: reports many performance relevant settings, switches them to max performance and lurks from then on in the background to monitor other benchmark executions and tests. By comparing scores made with defaults we are able to directly identify settings that need adjustments - Provide basic CLI monitoring functionality through the
-mswitch
The monitoring now also displays some hardware information when starting:
tk@odroidxu4:~$ sbc-bench -m
Samsung Exynos EXYNOS5800 rev 1, Exynos 5422, Kernel: armv7l, Userland: armhf
CPU sysfs topology (clusters, cpufreq members, clockspeeds)
cpufreq min max
CPU cluster policy speed speed core type
0 1 0 200 1400 Cortex-A7 / r0p3
1 1 0 200 1400 Cortex-A7 / r0p3
2 1 0 200 1400 Cortex-A7 / r0p3
3 1 0 200 1400 Cortex-A7 / r0p3
4 0 4 200 2000 Cortex-A15 / r2p3
5 0 4 200 2000 Cortex-A15 / r2p3
6 0 4 200 2000 Cortex-A15 / r2p3
7 0 4 200 2000 Cortex-A15 / r2p3
Thermal source: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/ (cpu0-thermal)
Time big.LITTLE load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
18:18:33: 800/ 500MHz 0.00 18% 0% 17% 0% 0% 0% 25.0°C
18:18:38: 800/ 600MHz 0.00 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 24.0°C
18:18:43: 700/ 500MHz 0.07 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 24.0°C
18:18:48: 800/ 600MHz 0.07 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 24.0°C
^C
The SoCs (system-on-chip) used on today's SBC are that performant that heat dissipation when running full load for some time becomes an issue. The strategies to deal with the problem differ by platform and kernel. We've seen CPU cores being shut down when overheating (Allwinner boards running with original Allwinner software), we know platforms where throttling works pretty well but by switching to a different kernel performance is trashed on exactly the same hardware. Sometimes it's pretty easy to spot what's going on, sometimes vendors cheat on us and it takes some efforts to get a clue what's really happening.
This tool therefore focuses on a controlled environment and intensive monitoring running in the background and being added to results output. The tool returns with a brief performance overview (see screenshot above) but the real information will be uploaded to an online pasteboard service (Rock 5B example). Without checking this detailed output numbers are worthless (since we always need to check what really happened).
You need Debian Stretch/Buster/Bullseye/Bookworm or Ubuntu Bionic/Focal/Jammy. Older variants are not supported (due to distro packages being way too outdated). Then it's
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/master/sbc-bench.sh
sudo /bin/bash ./sbc-bench.sh -c
You can also try out the new 'review mode' using -r instead of -c:
sudo /bin/bash ./sbc-bench.sh -r
This takes only a few seconds longer but generates a lot of additional insights especially on new platforms/SBC. It also exposes stuff that might invalidate proper benchmark execution (counterfeit SD cards, USB negotiation problems, 'bad settings' and so on). This mode is designed to provide a sane environment for further benchmark testing executed in another/different shell(s) so stopping the script via [ctrl]-[c] is necessary when done.
Unfortunately to adjust the cpufreq governor and to collect monitoring data execution as root is needed. So do not run this on productive systems or if you don't understand what the script is doing.
I chose mhz, tinymembench, ramlat, cpuminer, stockfish, 7-zip, cpufetch and OpenSSL's AES benchmarks for the following reasons:
This tool is not a benchmark but instead measures real CPU clockspeeds. This is helpful on platforms where cpufreq support is not available (yet) or we can not rely on the clockspeed values returned by the kernel. This applies to platforms where vendors are cheating (RPi, Amlogic), where weird clockspeed capping occurs for unknown reasons or where actual clockspeeds are set via jumpers while the clockspeeds available to the kernel are derived from device-tree (DT) entries. On a Clearfog Pro routerboard it will look like this for example (DT defines 666/1332 MHz while I configured 800/1600 MHz via jumper):
Checking cpufreq OPP:
Cpufreq OPP: 1332 Measured: 1599 (1598.621/1598.759/1598.324) (+20%)
Cpufreq OPP: 666 Measured: 799 (799.502/798.295/799.115) (+20%)
We call mhz twice. At the begin of the benchmark with an idle and cold system walking through all cpufreq OPP and directly after the most demanding benchmark has finished with the device still under full load to see whether behaviour changes when SoC is overheated. This is on a Thundercomm Dragonboard 845c. Prior to benchmark execution it looked like this:
Checking cpufreq OPP for cpu4-cpu7 (Qualcomm Kryo 3XX Gold):
Cpufreq OPP: 2803 Measured: 2704 (2705.057/2704.717/2704.717) (-3.5%)
Cpufreq OPP: 2649 Measured: 2704 (2704.830/2704.717/2704.717) (+2.1%)
When running the multi-threaded 7zip benchmark, the SoC temperature exceeds 80°C and afterwards the 2803 MHz cpufreq OPP is gone while the reported 2649 MHz are in reality only ~1940:
Checking cpufreq OPP for cpu4-cpu7 (Qualcomm Kryo 3XX Gold):
Cpufreq OPP: 2649 Measured: 1940 (1955.570/1943.795/1922.274) (-26.8%)
Unlike other 'RAM benchmarks' tinymembench checks for both memory bandwidth and latency in a lot of variations so it's even possible to get some insights about internal cache sizes. It also measures each mode at least two times and if sample standard deviation exceeds 0.1%, it is shown in brackets next to the result. So it's pretty easy to spot background activity ruining benchmark results.
On hybrid systems with different CPU cores (big.LITTLE, DynamicIQ, Alder/Raptor Lake) we pin execution one time to an efficiency/little and one time to a performance/big core to know the difference this makes. For the sake of simplicity we output memcpy and memset numbers at the end of the benchmark. On an overclocked RPi 3 B+ (arm_freq=1570, over_voltage=4, core_freq=500, sdram_freq=510, over_voltage_sdram=2) this will look like this
Memory performance:
memcpy: 1316.0 MB/s (0.8%)
memset: 1933.9 MB/s
On a NanoPC T4 (RK3399, 2xA72/4xA53 CPU cores) this will look like this with mainline kernel and conservative settings without any optimizations yet:
Memory performance:
memcpy: 2054.9 MB/s
memset: 8453.0 MB/s (0.2%)
memcpy: 4238.8 MB/s (0.4%)
memset: 9082.5 MB/s (0.9%)
(first two lines show execution on a little A53 core, the last ones when pinned to an A72 big core)
On ARM SoCs CPU and GPU/VPU usually share memory access so it's worth a try to experiment with disabling HDMI/GPU for headless use cases. Often memory bandwidth and therefore overall performance increases. Same when switching between kernel branches.
Provides some insights about cache sizes/speed and memory latency/bandwidth. Stuff like this.
Helps identifying CPUs/SoCs and also provides detailed info about them in review mode.
Prior to adding stockfish on most platforms this was the most demanding benchmark of the six and pretty efficient to check for appropriate heat dissipation and even instabilities under load. It makes heavy use of SIMD optimizations (NEON on ARM and SSE/AVX on x86) therefore generating more heat than unoptimized 'standard' code.
Heavy SIMD optimizations aren't really common, the generated scores depend a lot on compiler version and therefore this test is optional. Unless you execute sbc-bench -c or with MODE=extensive it will be skipped since results can be misleading. So consider this being a load generator to check whether your board will start to throttle or becomes unstable but take the benchmark numbers with a grain of salt unless you're a programmer and know what NEON, SSE and AVX really are and whether your application can make use of.
A typical result (Rock 5B with Ubuntu Focal) will look like this:
Cpuminer total scores (5 minutes execution): 25.32,25.31,25.30,25.29,25.28,25.12 kH/s
(result variation in this case is ok since all results are more or less the same. If the board would've started throttling or heavy background activitiy would've happened the later numbers would be much lower than the first ones)
Stockfish (open source chess engine) also makes heavy use of SIMD extensions but is heavy on memory access too putting even more load on devices than cpuminer which doesn't access RAM that much or at all since working set fits inside CPU caches.
As with cpuminer this test is optional (sbc-bench -s or MODE=extensive needed) since not representing any broader use case but being more of a stressor / load generator exposing thermal and stability issues. Consumption figures are higher compared to cpuminer since stockfish also stresses the DRAM interface and at least it's sufficient to expose a reliability issue with Rock 5B (most probably today RK3588 in general) since running this benchmark reliably freezes my Rock 5B at 2112 MHz DRAM clock.
7-zip's internal benchmark mode is a pretty good representation of 'server workloads in general'. When running on all cores in parallel it doesn't utilize CPU cores fully (at least not on ARM SBC, on x86_64 with Hyperthreading and performant memory controllers it's a different story), it depends somewhat on memory performance (low latency more important than high bandwidth) and amount of available memory. When running fully parallel on systems that have many cores but are low on memory we see just as in reality the kernel either killing processes due to 'out of memory' or starting to swap if configured.
On big.LITTLE systems we start with one run pinned to a little core followed by one pinned to a big core. Then follow 3 consecutive runs using all available cores. The results might look like this:
7-zip total scores (3 consecutive runs): 3313,3285,3050
7-zip total scores (3 consecutive runs): 3613,3598,3633
7-zip total scores (3 consecutive runs): 7382,7407,7426
(this is a RPi 3 B+ with latest firmware update applied destroying performance showing throttling symptoms followed by a Rock64 at 1.4GHz with Armbian standard settings passively cooled by small heatsink followed by an octa-core NanoPi Fire3 also at 1.4 GHz but with heatsink and fan this time)
How to interpret 7-zip MIPS scores: 7-zip ist all about integer CPU and memory performance. And by looking at the 'total score' (running on all CPU cores in parallel) you need to keep in mind that only a few use cases are really parallel and limited to 'integer performance'. That's why it's written 'server workloads in general' above since this applies here and overall performance scales well with count of CPU cores.
If your use case is different (desktop, rendering, video editing, number crunching and so on that either depends more on single-threaded performance and/or involves floating point arithmetic, vector extensions or GPGPU), 7-zip MIPS are rather irrelevant for you since they do not even remotely represent your use case!
With 'server workloads' in mind 7-zip MIPS give an estimate of what to expect. A system showing two times more 7-zip MIPS compared to another will be able to run more (maybe twice as much or even more) daemons/tasks as long as the stuff is only CPU bound. How an individual daemon/task performs is a totally different story and needs to be checked (single-core 7-zip MIPS).
With a system scoring 125% compared to another it's a different story and you need to examine individual results and your use case closely (time to switch from staring at numbers to Active Benchmarking).
A nice example is comparing two ARMv8 server designs: 32 Neoverse-N1 cores (Amazon m6g.8xlarge VM) vs. 96 ThunderX1 cores (dual CPU ThunderX CN8890 blade). Both systems share an identical multi-core score (~110000 7-zip MIPS) but any real server workload will perform better on the Neoverse-N1 design. Single-threaded performance there is at least twice as high, memory performance way better and this will make the difference with real-world stuff unless the use case is really all about 100% CPU utilisation on all cores all the time.
If those 7-zip MIPS apply only to a few selected use cases as performance indicator why are they used in sbc-bench?
- 7-zip's multi-threaded benchmark is that demanding that it can be used to check for power supply issues and thermal/throttling (that's why it's executed 3 times in a row)
- Results are not that much affected by compiler version which allows to compare scores made in different years with different OS versions (confirmed with Debian Stretch/Buster/Bullseye and Ubuntu Bionic/Focal/Jammy or in other words: GCC 6.3 - 10.2). Majority of kitchen-sink benchmarks overly depend on compiler version / settings and as such usually it makes comparing results from different years pointless
- Also the benchmark is not known to perform completely different when built for ARMv6, ARMv7 oder ARMv8 (the infamous
sysbench cpubenchmark on the other hand 'performs' 10-15 times better on a 64-bit Raspbian which is not related to 64-bit vs. 32-bit but just due to ARMv8 ISA having adivideinstruction) - To be able to get comparable scores spanning different years/libs/compilers submitted results are cherry picked to ensure 7-zip version being 16.02 or lower since on some platforms more recent 7-zip versions perform way better. Starting with v0.9.64 sbc-bench tries to build p7zip 16.02 when a higher version is detected.
- Unlike many other kitchen-sink benchmarks RAM access / memory performance matters (
sysbench cpufor example runs completely inside CPU caches). With this benchmark it's easy to spot memory performance issues like this (after switching bootloaders DDR4 RAM got clocked with just 333 instead of the former 1056 MHz). It's one of the 'cheapest' tools for regression testing but unfortunately not widely used there - 7-zip allows to spot different thermal throttling strategies for example throttling the memory controller instead of or in addition to CPU cores on certain platforms
- the multi-core test is also nice to spot internal CPU/SoC bottlenecks and/or scheduler improvements
A good example for the latter is Odroid XU4, three times tested with different kernel and OS versions (Stretch, Bionic and Focal which all build packages with different GCC versions). Memory performance remained the same (for a way to quickly check this see included script snippets) but for whatever reasons only the multi-threaded performance fluctuated over time:
| Kernel / Compiler | 7-zip single | 7-zip multi | CPU utilisation compression | CPU utilisation decompression |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kernel 4.9 / GCC 6.3 | 1622 | 6370 | 64% | 78% |
| Kernel 4.14 / GCC 7.3 | 1633 | 7100 | 64% | 78% |
| Kernel 5.4 / GCC 9.3 | 1604 | 8980 | 94% | 84% |
Smells like a scheduler problem with kernel 4.x. Only more detailed tests with more kernel/GCC combinations or switching to Active Benchmarking could really tell.
This test solely focuses on AES performance (VPN use case, full disk encryption). The test tries to quickly confirm whether an ARM SoC can make use of special crypto engines. Some SoC vendors don't care, some add proprietary engines to their SoCs (Marvell's CESA as an example), some vendors chose to license ARM's 'ARMv8 Crypto Extensions' (see here for some insights). So in case a board runs with an 64-bit ARM SoC this simple test shows the presence of crypto extensions or not.
Results might look like this on an overclocked Raspberry Pi 3 B+ at 1570 MHz lacking any crypto acceleration:
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-128-cbc 39393.73k 54173.16k 60220.67k 61720.92k 62518.61k
aes-192-cbc 35676.65k 46311.68k 51358.21k 52840.11k 53157.89k
aes-256-cbc 33339.62k 42962.13k 46476.37k 47619.07k 47925.93k
Vs. an Orange Pi Zero Plus based on Allwinner H5 heavily underclocked at just 816 MHz:
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-128-cbc 102568.41k 274205.76k 458456.23k 569923.58k 613422.42k
aes-192-cbc 95781.66k 235775.72k 366295.72k 435745.79k 461294.25k
aes-256-cbc 91725.44k 211677.08k 313433.77k 362907.31k 380482.90k
ARMv8 Crypto Extensions make the difference here. Even at almost half the CPU clockspeed with small data chunks at least 2.5 times faster and up to 9 times faster with larger chunks. Looking at different chunk sizes makes a lot of sense since some proprietary crypto engines suffer from high initialization overhead. See these numbers for a Banana Pi R2 based on a MediaTek MT7623 with proprietary crypto engine after compiling own kernel and OpenSSL (sources):
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-128-cbc 519.15k 1784.13k 6315.78k 25199.27k 124499.22k
aes-192-cbc 512.39k 1794.01k 6375.59k 25382.23k 118693.89k
aes-256-cbc 508.30k 1795.05k 6339.93k 25042.60k 112943.10k
Benchmarking a system that is otherwise busy will result in numbers without meaning. Therefore it's important to ensure the system is as idle as possible. That's the reason sbc-bench will only start once '1 min average load' is reported as below 0.1 or CPU utilization less than 2.5% for 30 seconds:
Of course this is not sufficient since background tasks might become active later or cron jobs result in some peak activity in between. As much such services as possible should be stopped prior to benchmark execution or in best case a rather minimal image should be used for testing. On the other hand sbc-bench can also easily be used to compare 'desktop' and 'minimal' images.
But comparisons only make some sense if execution of the benchmark can be observed. That's what sbc-bench's background monitoring is for that will be appended to detailed result list. We can there look for the following problems:
The 7-zip benchmark when running on all cores can result in the system starting to swap when running low on memory. A good example for an affected board is the inexpensive NanoPi Fire3 with 8 A53 cores but just 1 GB DRAM. When we search in the detailed result output for Swap we'll find 2 occurences. One check prior to the benchmarks and one afterwards. With a Fire3 this might look like:
Swap: 495M 0B 495M
Swap: 495M 34M 460M
So we know swapping has happened which negatively affected performance to some degree based on how swap is implemented. If swapping to SD card is configured performance will be severely impacted but in this case since it's a recent Armbian image the effects are negligible since Armbian implements zram based swap in the meantime (that's why kind of swap is also recorded in detailed result list).
While executing the multi-core 7-zip benchmark monitoring looked like this:
System health while running 7-zip multi core benchmark:
Time big.LITTLE load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:50:25: 1400/1400MHz 6.23 9% 0% 8% 0% 0% 0% 44.0°C
10:50:58: 1400/1400MHz 5.16 50% 0% 50% 0% 0% 0% 54.0°C
10:51:29: 1400/1400MHz 5.63 74% 0% 73% 0% 0% 0% 58.0°C
10:52:00: 1400/1400MHz 6.23 80% 0% 79% 0% 0% 0% 59.0°C
10:52:31: 1400/1400MHz 6.39 72% 0% 71% 0% 0% 0% 56.0°C
Always 0% in the %io column reported so not a big deal. With swap on SD card especially when using cards with low random IO performance we would've seen high occurences of %iowait activity and way lower performance numbers.
We have 3 benchmark executions that run completely single threaded: tinymembench, the first 7-zip run limited to a single CPU core and the openssl test. In all these cases the overall %cpu percentage has to match count of CPU cores (the first two lines can be ignored). So on an octa-core board like NanoPi Fire3 it has to show exactly 12% and nothing more:
Time big.LITTLE load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:40:05: 1400/1400MHz 0.18 2% 0% 0% 0% 1% 0% 40.0°C
10:41:05: 1400/1400MHz 0.63 10% 0% 10% 0% 0% 0% 44.0°C
10:42:05: 1400/1400MHz 0.94 12% 0% 12% 0% 0% 0% 44.0°C
10:43:05: 1400/1400MHz 0.98 12% 0% 12% 0% 0% 0% 40.0°C
10:44:05: 1400/1400MHz 0.99 12% 0% 12% 0% 0% 0% 40.0°C
10:45:05: 1400/1400MHz 1.00 12% 0% 12% 0% 0% 0% 40.0°C
10:46:06: 1400/1400MHz 1.04 12% 0% 12% 0% 0% 0% 40.0°C
On a dual-core board we're talking about 50% max, on hexa-cores it's 16% and on a quad-core board it must not exceed 25% (100 / 4):
Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:18:10: 1392MHz 1.05 17% 2% 15% 0% 0% 0% 59.5°C
10:19:10: 1392MHz 0.95 21% 0% 21% 0% 0% 0% 62.5°C
10:20:10: 1392MHz 1.02 25% 0% 25% 0% 0% 0% 61.7°C
10:21:10: 1392MHz 1.13 27% 1% 26% 0% 0% 0% 59.5°C
10:22:10: 1392MHz 1.05 25% 0% 25% 0% 0% 0% 60.0°C
10:23:10: 1392MHz 1.09 25% 0% 25% 0% 0% 0% 61.2°C
10:24:10: 1392MHz 1.03 25% 0% 25% 0% 0% 0% 61.7°C
In this case we were able to spot some background activity in this line:
10:21:10: 1392MHz 1.13 27% 1% 26% 0% 0% 0% 59.5°C
$something happened in parallel which will slightly lower the generated benchmark score. While 2% CPU utilisation for other stuff won't hurt that much at least we need to have an eye on this since when there are higher utilisation numbers reported when running the single threaded stuff the system shows way too much background activity to report reasonable benchmark scores. Then we simply generated numbers without meaning.
Depending on settings (kernel or some 'firmware' controlling the hardware) the clockspeeds might be dynamically reduced when the SoC starts to overheat. When clockspeeds are reduced then this obviously slows down operation.
sbc-bench continually monitors the clockspeeds but since we can only query every few seconds we might not catch short clockspeed decreases. That's why we check whether the kernel's cpufreq driver supports statistics. If true we record contents of stats/time_in_state prior to and after benchmark execution and compare afterwards. This way we are able to detect even short amounts of downclocking which will result in a warning like this: ATTENTION: Throttling occured. Check the log for details.
The detailed log then will contain information how much time (in milliseconds) has been spent on which clockspeed while executing the benchmarks. Might look like this on a NanoPC T4 without fan (only vendor's heatsink) after running the full set (NEON test included which resulted in the big cluster clocking down to even 408 MHz):
Throttling statistics (time spent on each cpufreq OPP) for CPUs 4-5:
1800 MHz: 1344.39 sec
1608 MHz: 372.95 sec
1416 MHz: 117.69 sec
1200 MHz: 48.28 sec
1008 MHz: 41.58 sec
816 MHz: 55.24 sec
600 MHz: 127.08 sec
408 MHz: 352.72 sec
Important: to get throttling notifications running a kernel with CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT=y is needed since otherwise cpufreq statistics are not available. And this will not work on Raspberries since there cpufreq driver has not the slightest idea what's going on.
And all of this doesn't work reliably on x86_64. Here you need to check 7-zip, cpuminer or stockfish scores. If they got lower during execution your device ran into thermal or powercapping issues.
If sbc-bench should benchmark in an automated fashion then exporting MODE=unattended prior to execution will prevent warning dialogs but of course sbc-bench will still check whether average load or CPU utilization is too high and refuse to start since benchmarking a busy system is useless.
Everything sent to stdout can be ignored (but parsing for 'check the log' is highly recommended since hinting at too much background activity and/or swapping resulting in numbers without meaning instead of benchmark scores). Full benchmark results are available at /var/log/sbc-bench.log with the last line containing a performance summary. So something like this could be used for regression testing and similar stuff:
MODE=unattended sbc-bench.sh -c | grep -q 'check the log' || tail -n1 /var/log/sbc-bench.log
When exporting MODE=extensive (not compatible with MODE=unattended so use either/or) then sbc-bench conducts additional tests:
- the
opensslbenchmarks will also be executed in parallel on all CPU cores (takes an additional minute) - the
cpuminertest will be fired up (5 more minutes) - the
stockfishstress tester will be fired up 3 times to check further for throttling and stability issues - on ARM/RISC-V SoCs with clusters of different CPU cores (e.g. RK3399 with 4 x Cortex-A53 and 2 x Cortex-A72) additional multi-threaded
7-ziptests per cluster are done (no duration estimate possible since depends on SoC architecture)
This operation mode will be extended further over time to get insights into SoC internals.
If $MaxKHz is exported prior to benchmark execution (e.g. by MODE=extensive MaxKHz=1416000 sbc-bench.sh) then cpufreq OPP higher than this value are skipped. On many platforms this allows CPU core comparisons at same clockspeeds (e.g. limiting all cores to 1.8 GHz on RK3588 or 1.4 GHz on RK3399). For a list of available values check
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy?/scaling_available_frequencies
If $CPUINFOFILE is exported prior to benchmark execution then SoC guessing and similar stuff happens not based on /proc/cpuinfo but on the supplied file that obviously needs to have a compatible format.
If $ExecuteCommand is exported prior to review mode (-r/-R) then instead of sbc-bench waiting/monitoring external benchmark executions it will execute whatever will be exported. So if you want to do a simple throttling test using stress-ng for example you would execute ExecuteCommand="stress-ng --cpu 0 -t 60m" sbc-bench.sh -R and check the output for throttling afterwards.
Though with such a goal in mind the better approach is running not stressors but benchmarks like 7-zip or cpuminer for a while since dropping scores over time are essentially a throttling indicator and this way you can spot other areas of throttling too (e.g. memory controller on recent Intel designs exceeding thermal tresholds lower than those for cpufreq throttling).
The whole point of sbc-bench being started in the first place was trying to replace the casual 'fire and forget' benchmarking done by SBC reviewers with a controlled execution of benchmarks in a fully monitored environment to get an idea why benchmark scores are as they are. A lot of stuff can go wrong! And in 'fire and forget' mode almost always unnoticed.
The reasons why monitoring is absolutely necessary and what 'SBC reviewers' (especially majority of 'Youtubers') usually forget to check/mention as follows:
It's plain stupid to trust into the clockspeeds a certain device pretends to use. Single-Board Computers mostly rely on ARM SoCs originating from the 'Android e-waste' world and there cheating is rather norm than exception.
Faking clockspeeds is pretty easy, as such we always measure (see above). Before conducting any benchmarks sbc-bench walks through all cpufreq operation points to check them. And it does the same for the highest clockspeeds when benchmarking has finished.
Looks like this when clockspeeds are fake:
Tinkerboard: fake 2.0 GHz vs. real 1.8 GHz
Checking cpufreq OPP (Cortex-A17):
Cpufreq OPP: 1992 Measured: 1793 (1796.339/1793.356/1789.489) (-10.0%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1920 Measured: 1792 (1793.825/1793.713/1789.355) (-6.7%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1896 Measured: 1793 (1796.309/1793.640/1791.471) (-5.4%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1800 Measured: 1793 (1794.914/1793.996/1790.777)
Cpufreq OPP: 1704 Measured: 1698 (1699.339/1698.236/1697.833)
...
Amlogic S905L2 TV box: fake 2.0 GHz vs. real 1.2 GHz
Checking cpufreq OPP (Cortex-A53):
Cpufreq OPP: 2016 Measured: 1197 (1197.660/1197.605/1197.411) (-40.6%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1752 Measured: 1196 (1197.022/1196.370/1195.166) (-31.7%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1536 Measured: 1196 (1197.286/1197.175/1195.540) (-22.1%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1416 Measured: 1196 (1197.549/1197.438/1195.637) (-15.5%)
Cpufreq OPP: 1200 Measured: 1197 (1197.535/1197.480/1197.397)
Cpufreq OPP: 1000 Measured: 996 (998.145/997.446/994.960)
Cpufreq OPP: 667 Measured: 663 (664.189/663.662/661.729)
...
Orange Pi 5: fake 2.4 GHz vs. real 2.2 GHz
Checking cpufreq OPP for cpu4-cpu5 (Cortex-A76):
Cpufreq OPP: 2400 Measured: 2221 (2221.092/2221.044/2220.997) (-7.5%)
Cpufreq OPP: 2352 Measured: 2220 (2220.519/2220.472/2220.328) (-5.6%)
Cpufreq OPP: 2304 Measured: 2219 (2219.994/2219.947/2219.947) (-3.7%)
Cpufreq OPP: 2256 Measured: 2219 (2219.565/2219.517/2219.422) (-1.6%)
Cpufreq OPP: 2208 Measured: 2197 (2197.609/2197.562/2197.469)
...
Swapping happens if physical RAM gets depleted and RAM contents are either compressed (zram/zswap) or transferred to slow storage (zswap/traditional swap). Both tasks harm performance, especially swap on storage used by SBCs (with low random I/O performance) is horribly slow.
Results are invalid and usually all you can do is to retest on a device with higher RAM capacity. More info on the topic above.
Zswap and zram are mutually exclusive so use either/or. In case zswap is configured on top of zram once swapping starts performance will be more harmed compared to zswap or zram alone since the kernel will compress memory pages twice.
If no swap is configured or swap space is not sufficiently large enough then the kernel decides out of memory (oom) and kills the process in question.
If this happens you won't get benchmark scores and might need to stop memory hungry processes (e.g. disabling temporarely a desktop environment, then rebooting and rechecking), tools like ps_mem might ease the task.
In case no swap is configured you might change that but will then most probably run into this.
It should be obvious that only an absolutely idle system can be benchmarked properly since if the benchmark program has to fight with other processes for CPU or memory resources the scores will suffer.
Results are invalid, more on this above.
This is Intel/AMD stuff. Their CPUs are restricted by certain limits: thermal throttling or e.g. cores allowed to clock higher with single-threaded loads compared to multi-threaded.
But there are also power limits that can be set by the device maker: a passively cooled notebook might ship with different settings than a huge desktop with plenty of thermal headroom. Since this x86 stuff is kinda off-topic, simply check this review for example and search for 'powercap-info' there.
This is an attempt to prevent overheating by reducing consumption with the immediate effect of reduced performance. If it has happened of course results are invalid.
Background: one or more thermal sensors in SoC/CPU are used to determine warning and critical temperatures to then take measures:
Downclocking CPU cores when temperatures get critical is the usual strategy, for more details see above.
The detailed sbc-bench output contains a monitoring section and in case throttling happens over a time period long enough then the reduced clockspeeds can be spotted easily:
Example of a Tinkerboard starting to throttle at 70°C and clocking down to 1200 MHz
##########################################################################
Thermal source: /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/ (cpu_thermal)
System health while running tinymembench:
Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:52:40: 1800MHz 1.87 27% 9% 16% 0% 0% 0% 66.2°C
10:52:50: 1800MHz 1.89 29% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 66.5°C
10:53:00: 1800MHz 1.91 29% 3% 26% 0% 0% 0% 67.7°C
10:53:10: 1800MHz 1.77 27% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C
10:53:20: 1800MHz 1.65 28% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C
10:53:30: 1800MHz 1.70 27% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.0°C
10:53:40: 1800MHz 1.67 27% 2% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:53:51: 1800MHz 1.57 28% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:54:01: 1800MHz 1.56 28% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:54:11: 1704MHz 1.63 29% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:54:21: 1800MHz 1.77 29% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:54:31: 1704MHz 1.96 28% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:54:41: 1704MHz 1.81 28% 2% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:54:52: 1608MHz 1.68 29% 2% 26% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:55:02: 1800MHz 1.66 28% 2% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
System health while running ramlat:
Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:55:07: 1800MHz 1.61 27% 7% 19% 0% 0% 0% 72.1°C
10:55:10: 1800MHz 1.56 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:55:13: 1608MHz 1.56 26% 0% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:55:16: 1800MHz 1.59 27% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:55:19: 1800MHz 1.59 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C
10:55:22: 1800MHz 1.70 27% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:55:25: 1800MHz 1.73 27% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C
10:55:28: 1800MHz 1.73 27% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C
10:55:32: 1800MHz 1.67 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:55:35: 1800MHz 1.62 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C
10:55:38: 1800MHz 1.62 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:55:41: 1800MHz 1.57 26% 1% 24% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
System health while running OpenSSL benchmark:
Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:55:42: 1800MHz 1.57 27% 7% 19% 0% 0% 0% 74.2°C
10:55:58: 1512MHz 1.44 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:56:14: 1512MHz 1.41 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 71.2°C
10:56:30: 1512MHz 1.37 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:56:46: 1800MHz 1.43 26% 0% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.0°C
10:57:03: 1512MHz 1.34 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.0°C
10:57:19: 1704MHz 1.33 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
System health while running 7-zip single core benchmark:
Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:57:30: 1512MHz 1.26 27% 6% 20% 0% 0% 0% 70.8°C
10:57:38: 1704MHz 1.32 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:57:46: 1608MHz 1.34 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:57:55: 1704MHz 1.31 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.0°C
10:58:03: 1608MHz 1.50 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.6°C
10:58:11: 1608MHz 1.42 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:58:19: 1800MHz 1.39 26% 1% 24% 0% 0% 0% 70.0°C
10:58:27: 1704MHz 1.49 26% 1% 24% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:58:35: 1704MHz 1.57 26% 1% 24% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:58:43: 1512MHz 1.52 26% 1% 24% 0% 0% 0% 70.0°C
10:58:51: 1704MHz 1.44 26% 1% 24% 0% 0% 0% 69.2°C
10:58:59: 1800MHz 1.41 27% 2% 24% 0% 0% 0% 70.4°C
10:59:07: 1704MHz 1.34 26% 1% 25% 0% 0% 0% 70.8°C
System health while running 7-zip multi core benchmark:
Time CPU load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp
10:59:10: 1512MHz 1.32 27% 5% 21% 0% 0% 0% 70.8°C
10:59:28: 1416MHz 2.06 88% 2% 85% 0% 0% 0% 74.6°C
10:59:47: 1416MHz 2.79 91% 2% 89% 0% 0% 0% 75.4°C
11:00:06: 1200MHz 3.13 90% 3% 86% 0% 0% 0% 74.6°C
11:00:23: 1416MHz 3.57 87% 3% 83% 0% 0% 0% 74.6°C
11:00:39: 1416MHz 3.73 96% 4% 92% 0% 0% 0% 75.0°C
11:00:55: 1416MHz 3.81 85% 2% 82% 0% 0% 0% 74.2°C
11:01:13: 1200MHz 4.01 94% 1% 92% 0% 0% 0% 74.6°C
11:01:33: 1200MHz 4.02 92% 2% 90% 0% 0% 0% 75.8°C
11:01:53: 1200MHz 4.23 88% 3% 84% 0% 0% 0% 73.3°C
11:02:10: 1200MHz 4.29 88% 3% 85% 0% 0% 0% 75.0°C
11:02:26: 1416MHz 4.10 76% 3% 72% 0% 0% 0% 75.0°C
11:02:42: 1512MHz 3.84 81% 2% 78% 0% 0% 0% 71.2°C
11:03:01: 1200MHz 3.94 88% 2% 86% 0% 0% 0% 75.4°C
11:03:19: 1416MHz 3.94 92% 2% 89% 0% 0% 0% 75.0°C
11:03:36: 1416MHz 3.82 89% 3% 86% 0% 0% 0% 75.0°C
11:03:53: 1512MHz 4.02 88% 2% 85% 0% 0% 0% 75.0°C
11:04:10: 1416MHz 4.02 94% 4% 90% 0% 0% 0% 74.2°C
11:04:28: 1200MHz 3.94 90% 2% 87% 0% 0% 0% 75.8°C
##########################################################################
Though the monitoring output only taking samples every few seconds can't spot any peaks or dips as such we also try to report cpufreq statistics (if available). This might look like this:
Aforementioned Tinkerboard even clocked down shortly to 816 MHz
##########################################################################
Throttling statistics (time spent on each cpufreq OPP):
1800 MHz: 173.64 sec
1704 MHz: 68.23 sec
1608 MHz: 65.95 sec
1512 MHz: 157.73 sec
1416 MHz: 131.39 sec
1200 MHz: 101.11 sec
1008 MHz: 12.39 sec
816 MHz: 0.20 sec
696 MHz: 0 sec
600 MHz: 0 sec
408 MHz: 0 sec
##########################################################################
Allwinner H5 throttling just for a short amount of time
##########################################################################
Throttling statistics (time spent on each cpufreq OPP):
1368 MHz: 672.97 sec
1296 MHz: 3.62 sec
1200 MHz: 0 sec
1056 MHz: 0 sec
816 MHz: 0 sec
648 MHz: 0 sec
480 MHz: 0 sec
##########################################################################
On Raspberries there's another problem: the ARM cores having no idea at which frequency they run since clockspeeds and throttling are done in the closed source ThreadX domain (for details start reading from 'The real brain of the Pi is not open source' here). As such sbc-bench also queries ThreadX in monitoring mode and lists fake and real frequencies next to each other:
Raspberry Pi 3B struggling with temperatures exceeding 80°C
System health while running 7-zip multi core benchmark:
Time fake/real load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq Temp VCore
23:19:21: 1200/1200MHz 1.00 12% 0% 5% 0% 5% 0% 61.2°C 1.3062V
23:19:54: 1200/1200MHz 2.17 79% 1% 78% 0% 0% 0% 68.8°C 1.3062V
23:20:25: 1200/1200MHz 2.82 90% 2% 88% 0% 0% 0% 72.0°C 1.3062V
23:20:55: 1200/1200MHz 3.21 90% 2% 88% 0% 0% 0% 73.1°C 1.3062V
23:21:28: 1200/1200MHz 3.53 87% 7% 80% 0% 0% 0% 75.2°C 1.3062V
23:22:01: 1200/1200MHz 3.62 87% 67% 20% 0% 0% 0% 78.4°C 1.3062V
23:22:37: 1200/1195MHz 3.83 86% 4% 81% 0% 0% 0% 77.9°C 1.3062V
23:23:15: 1200/1034MHz 4.07 95% 1% 94% 0% 0% 0% 81.1°C 1.3062V
23:23:50: 1200/1034MHz 3.99 91% 2% 89% 0% 0% 0% 81.7°C 1.3062V
23:24:21: 1200/1200MHz 3.38 50% 2% 48% 0% 0% 0% 76.3°C 1.3062V
23:24:59: 1200/1200MHz 3.97 74% 31% 41% 0% 0% 0% 79.5°C 1.3062V
23:25:29: 1200/1200MHz 3.84 83% 4% 78% 0% 0% 0% 79.5°C 1.3062V
23:25:59: 1200/1141MHz 3.92 83% 1% 81% 0% 0% 0% 80.6°C 1.3062V
23:26:30: 1200/1034MHz 4.00 91% 1% 89% 0% 0% 0% 81.1°C 1.3062V
23:27:00: 1200/1034MHz 4.00 90% 1% 88% 0% 0% 0% 81.7°C 1.3062V
23:27:31: 1200/1200MHz 3.54 48% 2% 46% 0% 0% 0% 77.9°C 1.3062V
23:28:24: 1200/1034MHz 3.89 84% 52% 32% 0% 0% 0% 81.7°C 1.3062V
When all benchmarks have finished we then query ThreadX for throttling and under-voltage events (for the latter see below) and in case only thermal throttling has happened this looks like this then:
Raspberry Pi 3B throttling and under-voltage summary since last reboot
##########################################################################
Querying ThreadX on RPi for thermal or undervoltage issues:
0100000000000000000
||| |||_ under-voltage
||| ||_ currently throttled
||| |_ arm frequency capped
|||_ under-voltage has occurred since last reboot
||_ throttling has occurred since last reboot
|_ arm frequency capped has occurred since last reboot
##########################################################################
Another attempt to cope with critical temperatures is to simply kill CPU cores to lower consumption/temps under load. Almost a decade ago Allwinner's Android kernels were (in)famous for this but Amlogic started to do this with their Android kernels also in recent years (but at least they bring the killed CPU cores up again when temperatures settle).
That's why sbc-bench also collects dmesg output while running the benchmarks to spot such problems ruining benchmark scores:
Khadas VIM3 `dmesg` output while killing two cores at 90°C and bringing them back up again below 85°C
[ 2877.094811] thermal thermal_zone0: temp:90000 increase, hyst:5000, trip_temp:90000, hot:1
[ 2877.115730] IRQ33 no longer affine to CPU1
[ 2877.115752] IRQ53 no longer affine to CPU1
[ 2877.115755] IRQ54 no longer affine to CPU1
[ 2877.115758] IRQ55 no longer affine to CPU1
[ 2877.115822] process 11494 (cpuminer) no longer affine to cpu1
[ 2877.115856] CPU1: shutdown
[ 2877.116885] psci: CPU1 killed (polled 0 ms)
[ 2877.163235] process 11496 (cpuminer) no longer affine to cpu3
[ 2877.163264] CPU3: shutdown
[ 2877.164291] psci: CPU3 killed (polled 0 ms)
[ 2877.198777] idx > max freq
[ 2877.302771] idx > max freq
[ 2877.406789] idx > max freq
[ 2877.406809] thermal thermal_zone0: temp:84500 decrease, hyst:5000, trip_temp:90000, hot:0
[ 2877.424153] Detected VIPT I-cache on CPU1
[ 2877.424202] CPU1: update cpu_capacity 631
[ 2877.424204] CPU1: Booted secondary processor [410fd034]
[ 2877.444258] Detected VIPT I-cache on CPU3
[ 2877.444291] CPU3: update cpu_capacity 1192
[ 2877.444293] CPU3: Booted secondary processor [410fd092]
This is a Raspberry Pi 3B Plus and CM3+ speciality with their BCM2837B0 SoC said to clock at 1400 MHz. But unless you set temp_soft_limit=70 in config.txt the SoC will silently be limited to 1200 MHz once 60°C are hit. Since nobody knows sbc-bench is warning.
This is another Raspberry Pi speciality caused by their (in)famous 5V powering. Ohm's law also exists in the SBC world and low voltages combined with high currents always result in a voltage drop unless you have a proper power supply with fixed cable that can compensate for this voltage drop (read as: if you buy a Pi then always buy their appropriate USB-C wall wart as well).
We query ThreadX after executing all benchmarks and if you suffered from voltage drops (input voltage sacking below ~4.65V) then performance is ruined and it looks like this in detailed output:
RPi reporting under-voltage and frequency capping
1010000000000000000
||| |||_ under-voltage
||| ||_ currently throttled
||| |_ arm frequency capped
|||_ under-voltage has occurred since last reboot
||_ throttling has occurred since last reboot
|_ arm frequency capped has occurred since last reboot
Frequency capping is the try to compensate for the voltage drops preventing the SBC from crashing. The SoC's various engine's clockspeeds are lowered immediately (ARM cores to 600 MHz with RPi 2-4, now with RPi 5 down to 1000/1500 MHz) and performance will suffer a lot. Since a few years fortunately those under-voltage events are also logged in kernel ring buffer when running with Raspberry Pi Ltd.'s kernels as such sbc-bench's detailed output will contain a section like this:
Multiple voltage drops on a RPi 4B while benchmarking
##########################################################################
dmesg output while running the benchmarks:
[ 1964.179580] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 1974.259710] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 1982.323967] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 1988.372011] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2004.500454] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2014.580643] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2034.741173] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2050.869645] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2058.933690] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2066.997794] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2075.062096] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2081.110116] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2097.238583] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2101.270584] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2125.463233] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2133.527483] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2157.719971] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2163.767990] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2177.880416] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2183.928438] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
[ 2208.121072] hwmon hwmon1: Undervoltage detected!
[ 2214.169136] hwmon hwmon1: Voltage normalised
##########################################################################
Frequency capping often gets confused with thermal throttling but they're really different things though can occur in parallel. Then sbc-bench will hint at both in detailed output:
under-voltage, frequency capping and throttling while benchmarking
11100000000000000000
||| |||_ under-voltage
||| ||_ currently throttled
||| |_ arm frequency capped
|||_ under-voltage has occurred since last reboot
||_ throttling has occurred since last reboot
|_ arm frequency capped has occurred since last reboot
This is mostly an Armbian issue: their OS images for Raspberries for almost two years lacked arm_boost=1 (which is a requirement for RPi 4B with BCM2711 C0 or later to automagically increase maximum clockspeed from 1500 MHz to 1800 MHz w/o overvolting) while at the same time setting over_voltage=2 and arm_freq=1800 which might improve performance on early RPi 4B but often does the opposite on recent RPi 4 since with these silly settings the CPU gets overvolted, therefore heats up more quickly and is prone to throttling.
-r/-R
When Linux is using FUSE/userland methods to access NTFS filesystems performance will be significantly harmed or at least on majority of SBCs likely be bottlenecked by maxing out one or more CPU cores. It is highly advised when benchmarking with any NTFS to monitor closely CPU utilization or better switch to a 'Linux native' filesystem like ext4 since representing 'storage performance' a lot more than 'somewhat dealing with a foreign filesystem' as with NTFS.
When ondemand cpufreq governor is used it is important to tweak some of these governor's settings, especially io_is_busy. If this is set to 0 (default) then in case of pure I/O loads CPU clockspeeds aren't ramped up as quickly as needed or sometimes at all. As such I/O performance generally suffers, sometimes significantly. See here for example which difference that might make.