benchmark improvements (Was: Re: [PATCH] sysdeps/arm/armv7/multiarch/memcpy_impl.S: Improve performance.)

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh@redhat.com>]

Adding libc-alpha since my comments on this are more suitable there -
maybe we should just get rid of the ports mailing list altogether.

On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 02:58:23PM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
> The key advantage of the cortex-strings framework is that it allows
> graphing the results of benchmarks. Often changes to string function
> performance can only really be analysed graphically as otherwise you
> end up with a huge soup of numbers, some going up, some going down and
> it is very hard to separate the signal from the noise.

We already depend on gd-devel to draw graphs for memusagestat.  Maybe
we could leverage that in the microbenchmark as well and come up with
html reports rather than just a bench.out?  Graphs in general are a
lot more readable and I agree that they would be the next logical
improvement to the benchmark framework.

> The glibc benchmarks also have some other weaknesses that should
> really be addressed, hopefully I'll have some time to write patches
> for some of this work.

I know Ondrej had proposed a few improvements as well.  I'd like to
see those reposted so that we can look at it and if possible, have
them merged in.

Siddhesh