NetBSD Is Making Progress On Benchmarking For Performance/Regression Testing

One of many interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 projects is working on automated benchmarking for NetBSD in order to allow for performance/regression testing of this BSD operating system known for its portability across CPU architectures.

That work for automated benchmarking of NetBSD for GSoC 2020 is, of course, being done via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. While the Phoronix Test Suite has been running on BSDs for years, my focus has primarily been on FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD along with their derivatives.

Student developer Apurva Nandan is working for the NetBSD project on making the Phoronix Test Suite in good shape for NetBSD, which primarily is about porting of existing test profiles to see that they run gracefully on NetBSD. While there are many BSD and Linux test profiles, adapting to NetBSD often comes down to build system differences or external dependencies not being available for different programs currently on NetBSD.

Apurva last week wrote a GSoC status update on this initiative via the NetBSD blog. Progress is being made on getting more tests up and running on NetBSD. Great to see good progress is being made on getting more tests up and running and have previously let Apurva know already that those NetBSD improvements will be happily accepted upstream once complete.

The goal ultimately is for the NetBSD project to have automated performance testing / regression infrastructure in place powered by the Phoronix Test Suite with Phoromatic for alerting them to differences either on a daily/timed basis or on a per-commit basis as well. There continues to be a public and very basic example of that with different software projects at LinuxBenchmarking.com, which has formerly tracked the Linux kernel, Clear Linux, and other projects, but due to lack of resources (energy and cooling costs, etc), is currently in a static mode for nearly all of those performance trackers.