The litmus benches are really only intended for introspection/debugging/
cool plots/etc. They're interesting to poke around with and cover a wide
range of littlefs's data-structures, but are not very rigorous.
To make this more clear for new users, added a new litmus flag for
benches:
litmus = true
This doesn't change anything about how the bench is run, but serves as a
marker to hint that the bench is intended for non-rigorous benchmarking.
---
In the makefile, litmus tests are disabled by default at runtime
(--no-litmus). This is to limit `make bench` to benches that are useful
for performance comparisons.
With --no-litmus at runtime, the litmus benches are at least compiled
into the bench_runner, which should hopefully encourage keeping them up
to date with code changes. Eventually we should also run them in CI, but
only to check for runtime errors.
Unlike our tests, we're not really worried about compile time at the
moment due to how few/small our benches are.
Based on some experience out-of-tree:
- bench_rbyd - Simple rbyd attr/id litmus benchmark
- bench_btree (new) - Simple btree id/name litmus benchmark
- bench_file (new) - Simple file read/write litmus benchmark
- bench_dir (new) - Simple dir read/write/stat litmus benchmark
- bench_wt - Heavy-duty write-throughput benchmark
- bench_rt (new) - Heavy-duty read-throughput benchmark
Benches take a long time to run for useful results, so we probably don't
want to go crazy with them like with the tests.
Honestly, we may want to chop this down to just the
write/read-throughput benches.
This gives us much more room for activities.
It makes sense to keep the test disk small: easier parallelization,
heavier emubd with more test features, and if you're running into space
issues in a test, that usually just means you need to be more creative
with how the test is setup.
But for benches, we're interested what happens when we throw a ton of
data at the system.
Also defaulted to noop erases. 0xff erases behave more predictably,
which is useful for testing. But for benching, less work is faster.
These were copied from external benchmarks, and tweaked/simplified a
bit based on gained experience.
I mostly just wanted something to test the bench runner/scripts, with
bench_rbyd showcasing a low-level litmus benchmark, and bench_wt
showcasing a high-level throughput benchmark.
Though bench_wt has proven to be a _very_ versatile benchmark, and will
likely be the first stop for getting an understanding of high-level
performance implications.
---
Also added bench_helpers.h/c, which includes a couple helper functions:
- bench_helpers_warmup - Warm up the filesystem by writing a 1 block
file 2*block_count times. This is meant to exhaust any preerased
state, post-format lookahead buffers, etc.
- bench_helpers_usage - Find a tight bound on disk usage. This allocates
a bitmap to find the tight bound, unlike lfs3_fs_usage, which is
best-effort. However the bitmap is hidden behind BENCH_HEAP_PAUSE to
prevent messing with parallel heap measurements.
This is based on how bench.py/bench_runners have actually been used in
practice. The main changes have been to make the output of bench.py more
readibly consumable by plot.py/plotmpl.py without needing a bunch of
hacky intermediary scripts.
Now instead of a single per-bench BENCH_START/BENCH_STOP, benches can
have multiple named BENCH_START/BENCH_STOP invocations to measure
multiple things in one run:
BENCH_START("fetch", i, STEP);
lfsr_rbyd_fetch(&lfs, &rbyd_, rbyd.block, CFG->block_size) => 0;
BENCH_STOP("fetch");
Benches can also now report explicit results, for non-io measurements:
BENCH_RESULT("usage", i, STEP, rbyd.eoff);
The extra iter/size parameters to BENCH_START/BENCH_RESULT also allow
some extra information to be calculated post-bench. This infomation gets
tagged with an extra bench_agg field to help organize results in
plot.py/plotmpl.py:
- bench_meas=<meas>+amor, bench_agg=raw - amortized results
- bench_meas=<meas>+div, bench_agg=raw - per-byte results
- bench_meas=<meas>+avg, bench_agg=avg - average over BENCH_SEED
- bench_meas=<meas>+min, bench_agg=min - minimum over BENCH_SEED
- bench_meas=<meas>+max, bench_agg=max - maximum over BENCH_SEED
---
Also removed all bench.tomls for now. This may seem counterproductive in
a commit to improve benchmarking, but I'm not sure there's actual value
to keeping bench cases committed in tree.
These were alway quick to fall out of date (at the time of this commit
most of the low-level bench.tomls, rbyd, btree, etc, no longer
compiled), and most benchmarks were one-off collections of scripts/data
with results too large/cumbersome to commit and keep updated in tree.
I think the better way to approach benchmarking is a seperate repo
(multiple repos?) with all related scripts/state/code and results
committed into a hopefully reproducible snapshot. Keeping the
bench.tomls in that repo makes more sense in this model.
There may be some value to having benchmarks in CI in the future, but
for that to make sense they would need to actually fail on performance
regression. How to do that isn't so clear. Anyways we can always address
this in the future rather than now.
The previous system of relying on test name prefixes for ordering was
simple, but organizing tests by dependencies and topologically sorting
during compilation is 1. more flexible and 2. simplifies test names,
which get typed a lot.
Note these are not "hard" dependencies, each test suite should work fine
in isolation. These "after" dependencies just hint an ordering when all
tests are ran.
As such, it's worth noting the tests should NOT error of a dependency is
missing. This unfortunately makes it a bit hard to catch typos, but
allows faster compilation of a subset of tests.
---
To make this work the way tests are linked has changed from using custom
linker section (fun linker magic!) to a weakly linked array appended to
every source file (also fun linker magic!).
At least with this method test.py has strict control over the test
ordering, and doesn't depend on 1. the order in which the linker merges
sections, and 2. the order tests are passed to test.py. I didn't realize
the previous system was so fragile.
It doesn't make sense to test more complex logic, such as t2_btree.toml,
when the logic it is built on, t1_rbyd.toml, does not past testing. The
test runner already guarantees a consistent lexicographic order, so all
we need to do is renamed these from test_* -> tn_*.
Note, if we every have more than 10 tests, we will need to bump up the
number of digits for all tests, so t1_rbyd.toml -> t01_rbyd.toml. This
is the main downside of lexicographic ordering. But we'll cross that
bridge when we get to it.
- Added both uattr (limited to 256) and id (limited to 65535) benchmarks
covering the main rbyd operations
- Fixed issue where --defines gets passed to the test/bench runners when
querying id-specific information. After changing the test/bench
runners to prioritize explicit defines, this causes problems for
recorded benchmark results and debug related things.
- In plot.py/plotmpl.py, made --by/-x/-y in subplots behave somewhat
reasonably, contributing to a global dataset and the figure's legend,
colors, etc, but only shown in the specified subplot. This is useful
mainly for showing different -y values on different subplots.
- In plot.py/plotmpl.py, added --labels to allow explicit configuration
of legend labels, much like --colors/--formats/--chars/etc. This
removes one of the main annoying needs for modifying benchmark results.
Christopher Haster