Performance and Efficiency at the Forefront

Performance can mean different different things to different people. For us it is a cross between what is considered traditional performance and efficiency. The core foundation of Serpent OS is to increase the performance of binaries and libraries we distribute to you in all configurations. This provides users with greater energy efficiency so your laptop lasts longer and generates less heat. Better battery is always a bonus and there's less waiting around for your device.

Making Binaries More Efficient

There's been plenty of strategies and techniques to boost the performance of benchmarks. For example, overclocking allows you to get greater performance at a higher power draw. From the OS side, tuning the kernel with various CPU schedulers can improve performance by putting the CPU to sleep less often, or not allowing it to reduce the frequency during idle periods. A 1% increase in performance by increasing power draw by 5% makes an extremely poor OS default, but looks great on a benchmark that only reports the time taken. Serpent OS has many tools at its disposal to squeeze out more from your hardware.

Build system defaults:

  • Moving away from x86_64-generic baseline to the newer x86_64-v2 as the minimum. This uses up to SSE4.2 and has been around since 2010.
  • Creating multiple versions of packages so that newer supported CPUs can use more optimizations. Initially this means making x86_64-v3+ packages to utilise AVX2 and other extra instructions.
  • Preferring 128 bit vector width for AVX workloads by default. AVX and AVX2 have shown to be outstanding performers, but only on select workloads (such as heavy math or machine learning software). This avoids the downsides of AVX2 while allowing higher vector width where it provides maximum advantage.
  • clang compiler by default for packages.

boulder makes customizing the builds of individual packages easy:

  • Integrating profile guided optimization (PGO) workloads with only a couple of lines. This includes context sensitive 2 stage clang PGO.
  • Using link time optimizations (LTO) where possible.
  • The ability to use gcc for packages where a performance deficit is detected.

Integrating benchmarking-tools

Solid benchmarking is a challenging process and requires a strong methodology and understanding what is creating the difference in results. By integrating benchmarking-tools into Serpent OS, it allows us to test the performance of packages we deliver to users. Some important features from integrating benchmarking-tools are:

  • Actually tests the software installed on your system by the distribution!
  • Few requirements to run in a minimal environment allowing us to compare multiple packages against each other, or even another distro in a chroot.
  • Can keep the system in a near identical state but with different versions of a single package.
  • Integrated perf result generation to give more clarity around performance differences.
  • Accessible to all users so they may run the same tests, or even add their own.

From Theory to Practice!

Putting the two pieces together allows us to transition from academic theory, to better performance for your system. By testing the performance of various knobs and features of boulder, we can identify ones that lead to better results in most cases and roll them out as Serpent OS system defaults. This means that while we can't measure each and every package, we can be confident that they are most likely benefiting from the performance tuning of packages we can measure.

Allowing per package compiler flag changes through the tuning key in boulder means that we can try numerous configurations for tuning a single package. Running each package through benchmarking-tools reveals the impact that each option has on the performance via perf. While this can be a time consuming process, it is one that does happen to ensure you get a lightning fast experience. Allowing users to easily run the benchmarks can validate that the changes provide a benefit across varying hardware configurations.