Trying To Benchmark The MIPS Creator CI20 With Debian Linux

Long story short, the MIPS Creator CI20 hasn't been stable enough under load to produce any results. The board ends up choking with any of the processor-focused tests: even when it comes to just compiling the open-source benchmarks, quite often the board will hang, hit a kernel panic, or other issues.

Even when it comes to kernel panics and errors, they aren't all the same but I've hit a variety of issues at different stages of trying to benchmark the CI20.

I've also tried testing the CI20 after disabling the display manager to try to conserve system resources, but still, problems persisted.

I also ended up re-flashing Debian on the CI20 using an SD card, but that still failed. Upgrading to all of the latest packages was also to no avail.

I was really looking forward to running some modern MIPS Linux benchmarks, but so far after playing with this development board for the past week, I've not had any success. For now I regret the $65 USD spent on this board, but remain hopeful that as the MIPS Linux code matures and at some point I'll finally be able to get benchmarks running on the MIPS Creator CI20. I was even looking forward to adding this MIPS coverage to the LinuxBenchmarking.com test farm to get some MIPS32 coverage in the mix with our compiler benchmarks, see how it compares to the dozens of other systems in the lab for Linux benchmarking, etc, but this board just isn't coping with load. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to let me know by commenting on this article.