Hello all,
I was recommended to post my observation to this mailing list; hope that
this is appropriate.
Since mid-March, my Tumbleweed suffers a drastic performance loss. I
observed this during my work on MAME (the emulator framework) which is
an application with high CPU load. For benchmark purposes, MAME offers a
command line option that suppresses screen output and turns off
real-time synchronization so that the emulator core is running at the
maximum speed. Typically you should expect a multiple of the real speed,
expressed by a percentage of far above 100%.
At some time in mid-March, the benchmark speed for a selected system
dropped from 900% to 300%, for another emulated system from 450% to
150%, which is already too low to ensure a full emulation speed with
screen output. To rule out any effects from the MAME application, I have
been using a version that I built almost a year ago, leaving it unchanged.
The described slowdown occurs on three separate desktop PCs, which means
that a hardware issue is unlikely. All PCs have a Core-i7 architecture.
Interestingly, on two laptops that I could use to test, the effect does
not occur. Consequently, this means that now my old laptop from 2012
with a Core i5-3320M(a)2.6 GHz runs MAME faster than my Core i7-6700K(a)4.0 GHz.
The slowdown also occurs in other applications. Notably, the Leawo
Bluray Player that runs in WINE is not able to sustain the frame rate
any longer, delivering chopped replay, which was perfect before.
During the last days I tried to bisect the kernel source from Github in
order to isolate the point where the effect started (remote origin:
git@github.com:openSUSE/kernel.git). Interestingly, the effect did not
show up until 4.16.0-rc6, while that same desktop PC already showed the
effect during the distro upgrade around 4.15.13 (which was in March).
The result is:
bad: 646d6e114288 Update to 4.16-rc6.
good: aec6bb8e2770 - Refresh
patches.suse/kernel-add-release-status-to-kernel-build.patch.
If desired, I can give you a small bundle of the MAME executable to run
the benchmark by yourself.
Here is the effect:
michael@capella:~/susekernel> uname -a
Linux capella 4.16.0-rc5-1-default+ #26 SMP PREEMPT Sun Apr 22 14:26:13
CEST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
michael@capella:~/susekernel> git status
HEAD detached at aec6bb8e2770
nothing to commit, working tree clean
michael@capella:~/susekernel> cd ~/mame
michael@capella:~/mame> ./mame64_0186 ti99_4a -bench 20
Average speed: 883.31% (19 seconds)
michael@capella:~/mame>
michael@capella:~/susekernel> uname -a
Linux capella 4.16.0-rc6-1-default+ #27 SMP PREEMPT Sun Apr 22 16:17:52
CEST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
michael@capella:~/susekernel> git status
HEAD detached at 646d6e114288
nothing to commit, working tree clean
michael@capella:~/susekernel> cd ~/mame
michael@capella:~/mame> ./mame64_0186 ti99_4a -bench 20
Average speed: 305.27% (19 seconds)
michael@capella:~/mame>
Greetings,
Michael
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