Passmark performance test for risc-v Linux

[alzinov]

I was wondering if there are any plans for compiling passmark performance tests (like the one you can download here: https://www.passmark.com/products/pt_linux/index.php) for Linux RISC-V architecture? If need I can provide some help with creating dev environment.

Thanks in advance for your response.

[David (PassMark)]

No we haven't looked at RISC-V. Partially because we don't have any RISC-V hardware to develop and test on.
Whatever system you have in mind would also need to run some common distro as well, as we don't really have the resources to support all the obscure ones. (e.g. Ubuntu or CentOS would be OK).

There are also a few external libraries we use. So any support would also be contingent on those libraries being available for that hardware.

[alzinov]

I can make a docker image that will contain qemu-system-riscv64, Linux 5.4 kernel and Fedora 32 disk image, alone with a script to boot Fedora using qemu. Using Fedora you can get quite a lot of libraries already ported and available as packages.
If you tell me what libraries are required for Passmark I can compile it for you and include it in that Fedora disk image.

Does that sound reasonable for you?

[David (PassMark)]

I assume you are suggesting we access this image remotely?
Physical hardware would be better. As what happens when there is a bug we need to fix and we have no development system again.

We wouldn't really want to release software without some testing on physical hardware, with at least a couple of distros.

[alzinov]

With Docker, you can pull the image from dockerhub on your local machine (Linux, or Windows x86) and run the container locally. Inside this container you will have access to RISC-V QEMU VM (which will be using Fedora disk image that you can later use on actual HW). That will give you RISC-V development environment.

The project I'm working on does not have actual HW yet, we are currently using cycle-accurate simulator (Firesim), so unfortunately cannot really help with hardware.
I know that there some RISC-V development boards available on the market - e.g. SiFIve

[David (PassMark)]

It is a benchmark test, it doesn't make sense to release a RiscV benchmark tool without having some real RiscV hardware.

[alzinov]

I see. Will you be keen to add risc-v support if we send you SiFive risc-v board?

[David (PassMark)]

I assume this hardware run Ubuntu?
We can give it a go, but we use some external libraries. The two highest risk ones are Crypto++ and Bullet physics. These are both widely used libraries and are available for ARM and x86, but we aren't sure for RISC-V? While it might be possible for us to port these external libraries to a new platform, it adds a lot of work for us (as compared to just re-compiling and testing our own software). They are both fairly large libraries. It might turn a 2 day project into a month long project.