Bug-fix release.
This release is based on beta release 2 of BYTE Magazine's BYTEmark benchmark program (previously known as BYTE's Native Mode Benchmarks). This document covers the Native Mode (a.k.a. Algorithm Level) tests; benchmarks designed to expose the capabilities of a system's CPU, FPU, and memory system.
Running a "make" will create the binary if all goes well. It is called "nbench" and performs a suite of 10 tests and compares the results to a Dell Pentium 90 with 16 MB RAM and 256 KB L2 cache running MSDOS and compiling with the Watcom 10.0 C/C compiler. If you define -DLINUX during compilation (the default) then you also get a comparison to an AMD K6/233 with 32 MB RAM and 512 KB L2-cache running Linux 2.0.32 and using a binary which was compiled with GNU gcc version 2.7.2.3 and GNU libc-5.4.38.
For more verbose output specify -v as an argument.
The primary web site is: http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html
The port to Linux/Unix was done by Uwe F. Mayer [email protected].
The index-split was done by Andrew D. Balsa, and reflects the realization that memory management is important in CPU design. The original tests have been left alone, however, the tests NUMERIC SORT, FP EMULATION, IDEA, and HUFFMAN now constitute the integer-arithmetic focused benchmark index, while the tests STRING SORT, BITFIELD, and ASSIGNMENT make up the new memory index.
The algorithms were not changed from the source which was obtained from the BYTE web site at http://www.byte.com/bmark/bmark.htm on December 14, 1996. However, the source was modified to better work with 64-bit machines (in particular the random number generator was modified to always work with 32 bit, no matter what kind of hardware you run it on). Furthermore, for some of the algorithms additional resettings of the data was added to increase the consistency across different hardware. Some extra debugging code was added, which has no impact on normal runs.
In case there is uneven system load due to other processes while this benchmark suite executes, it might take longer to run than on an unloaded system. This is because the benchmark does some statistical analysis to make sure that the reported results are statistically significant, and an increased variation in individual runs requires more runs to achieve the required statistical confidence.
This is a single-threaded benchmark and is not designed to measure the performance gain on multi-processor machines.
For details and customization read bdoc.txt.
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