Re: [Qemu-devel] emulated ARM performance vs real processor ?

[M P]

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Julien Heyman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks Dave.
> I use system emulation, and my main concern is "just" to know that the
> actual board will run faster than the emulation. So based on your example,
> and even though my target board (mini2440) is nowhere as fast as a Panda
> board, this should be the case by a comfortable margin. Now, as I am
> focusing on boot time, the time to read from flash (i.e. much faster in the
> emulated context than on the real flash) will counter-balance this a lot.
> Hopefully these two factors will even out and what I measure now will not be
> dramatically different than what I will get on the real board, but...we'll
> see.

I wrote the mini2440 support for qemu and used it a LOT, and it can
pretty easily emulate full speed on a core2. Some stuff is a bit
slower, but most is quite a bit faster somehow.
Note that emulates more than an armv4t, so if the code you run is not
compiled properly, it might just work in qemu, and fail miserably on
the real hardware..

Michael

> Regards,
> Julien
>
> On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:31 PM, David Gilbert <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 1 September 2011 08:32, Julien Heyman <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I was wondering if anyone had some data regarding the relative
>> > performance
>> > of any given ARM board emulated in QEMU versus the real thing. Yes, I do
>> > know this depends a lot on the host PC running qemu, but some
>> > ballpark/example figures would help. Say, I emulate a 400 Mhz ARM9
>> > processor
>> > on a Core2Duo laptop @ 2 Ghz, what kind of performance/timing ratio
>> > should I
>> > expect, one way or the other ? For example, for boot time.
>> > I have no idea whether the overhead of emulation is over-compensated by
>> > the
>> > huge processing power of the host compared to the real HW target, and by
>> > which factor.
>>
>> Comparing performance is always a bit tricky, and I've not really got
>> a solid set of benchmarks
>> ready to run to try it but to give some numbers:
>>
>> 1) Boot times
>>   Comparing the Linaro 11.08 ubuntu desktop images, time to boot to
>> desktop
>>
>>   Real Panda board (dual core A9 at 1GHz, 1GB RAM, running off SD
>> card) - 2minutes to desktop
>>   QEMU vexpress (2xA9 core, 1GB RAM, emulated sd card, running on a
>> Core2 Duo T9400 2.53GHz laptop) - 3minutes to desktop
>>
>>   (The times are scarily close to exact minutes - timeout somewhere?)
>>   Now, QEMU system mode only ever uses one host core when emulating
>> multiple cores, so there is a factor 2 disadvantage there, but
>> on the plus side the memory bandwidth of the host and the disk speed
>> is probably much higher than the Panda.
>>
>> 2) Simple md5sum benchmark
>>   As a really simple benchmark the test:
>>
>>    time (dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=1000 | md5sum)
>>
>>    Panda board 14.5s real, 10.7 user, 3.8s system
>>    Emulated Overo board (single A8 processor on same laptop as above)
>> - 41s real, 24.7s user, 16.4s system
>>    User mode emulated - 14.2s real, 14s user, 0.5s system
>>    Native on x86 host - 3.2s real, 2.5s user, 1.2s system
>>
>> So, that's two sets of pretty bogus dummy simple benchmarks!
>>
>> I suppose one observation is that the boot time isn't that bad
>> compared to the real (different) hardware, the user mode emulation
>> was comparable to the Panda, but the system emulation on a simple test
>> seems a lot slower.
>>
>> These things will vary wildly depending what your benchmark is; but as
>> a summary I'd say that the ARM system mode emulation is
>> fast enough to use interactively but CPU wise is noticeably slower
>> than user mode emulation.
>>
>> Dave
>
>