libMicro - portable microbenchmarks

LibMicro is a portable set of microbenchmarks that many Solaris engineers used during Solaris 10 development to measure the performance of various system and library calls. LibMicro was developed by Bart Smaalders and Phil Harman as part of their If Linux is faster it's a Solaris bug performance campaign. LibMicro is Open Source and uses the CDDL license.The libMicro sources include an awk script that generates color coded html pages to easily compare various OS revs, processors and other differences in a quick manner. This comparison shows an AMD Opteron system running Solaris 10 GA with libMicro compiled with Sun Studio 10 running in both 32 and 64 bit modes; the performance differences are interesting.

Source Code

The current release is 0.4.0.

• Download libMicro 0.4.0 (or 0.3.0)
• The source code (of the "trunk" in Mercurial) is browseable online
• It should compile under both SuSe and Solaris 9 & 10 using gcc or Studio 10 on Solaris.
• Mercurial repository (with anonymous pull enabled) is available via

hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/libmicro/libmicro

Future Work

There's lots of work still to do on libMicro. Have fun trying it out, and if you have questions, please ask them in the perf-discuss forum (perf-discuss AT opensolaris DOT org).