Hi everyone,

After a bit of patching and tinkering I got my SheevaPlug to boot FreeBSD from a UFS2-formatted USB stick. To compare it with Linux I decided to run nbench to see how FreeBSD compares with Ubuntu (which is shipped with the SheevaPlug). To my surprise, the results were atrocious! FreeBSD scores about 50 times worse than Ubuntu.

Of course, this performance difference is too large to be caused by implementation differences. There must be something more fundemental wrong here. To simplify things, I created a simple testcase that counts up to the maximum value of an integer:

int main() { int i = 0; do ++i; while(i > 0); return 0; }

This compiles to: (both on Linux and on FreeBSD)

0000848c <main>: 848c: e3a03000 mov r3, #0 ; 0x0 8490: e2833001 add r3, r3, #1 ; 0x1 8494: e3530000 cmp r3, #0 ; 0x0 8498: cafffffc bgt 8490 <main+0x4> 849c: e3a00000 mov r0, #0 ; 0x0 84a0: e1a0f00e mov pc, lr

This stresses the CPU and not much else. Since there are three instructions in the loop and the SheevaPlug runs at 1.2 GHz, I expect this to take around (1<<31)*3/1.2e9 ~ 5.3687 seconds. On Ubuntu:

$ time ./test real 0m5.422s user 0m5.390s sys 0m0.020s

Exactly as expected. On FreeBSD on the other hand:

%time ./test 286.000u 0.000s 4:47.22 99.8% 40+1321k 0+0io 0pf+0w

This takes almost five minutes, or over 50 times as long! All of it is user-space CPU time. Does anybody have a suggestion why the CPU appears to run so slowly in FreeBSD?

I pored over my kernel configuration but I don't see anything suspect. I did (manually) apply Hans Petter Selasky's patch [1] to be able to boot from USB, and consequently removed the NFS and BOOTP stuff from the config provided at sys/arm/conf/SHEEVAPLUG. Furthermore I removed the NO_SWAPPING and NO_FFS_SNAPSHOT options (because I plan to attach a USB disk drive) and I left in the KDB and DDB options because as I think they do not significantly affect performance. Is this correct?

P.S. The strange thing is that stuff like network performance is perfectly fine. I can fetch FTP data at 11 MB/s, which is about the maximum possible on the cheap 100 Mbit switch I use, and is even a few percent better than Ubuntu. So it seems it's really the CPU that's the bottleneck, for no apparent reason.