16.2 LMbench
LMbench is a widely-used memory benchmark in the embedded systems benchmarking. This section also covers a brief comparison with a predecessor device AM435x.
Some features of LMbench are:
- A kernel benchmark developed by Larry McVoy.
- LMbench is still active as of 2007, with Carl Staelin acting as maintainer.
- Suite of simple, portable, ANSI/C micro benchmarks for UNIX/POSIX.
- Compares different UNIX systems performance.
- Measure system latency and bandwidth of data movement among the processor and memory, network, file system, and disk.
- Focus on latency and bandwidth because performance issues are usually caused by latency problems, bandwidth problems, or some combination of the two.
- Version 3A15 includes a total of approximately 41 metrics divided under the categories of bandwidth, latency, and others.
- Out of the 41 micro benchmarks, bandwidth and latency micro benchmarks are explored in the next sections.