These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.7.0 of netperf: *) Add bits/s (-f b) and Bytes/s (-f B) as selectable throughput units. This may make life easier for folks doing post-processing of things like interim results. *) Miscelaneous fixes *) Much of the now-seeming kruft for things peripheral to netperf's core mission - have been removed though the code itself remains in the repository. So, things like looking-up egress interface, driver/slot information etc have been disabled in a manner requiring more than just a ./configure to bring-back. It wasn't clear those features were being used. This is a test of that hypothesis. These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.6.0 of netperf: *) Initial pass at support for --enable-intervals (WANT_INTERVALS) for Windows, courtesy of Jonathan Cook. *) When in demo mode (./configure --enable-demo and a global -D option netperf will make sure it emits "one last interval result" when the test is terminated. This should assist when post-processing results through the likes of rrdtool when there is a slow-down in the performance just at the end that would have stretched the interval to beyond the test termination. *) A fix to have the AF_UNIX tests realize that the value for "take the system default" socket buffer size became -1 years ago. Bug found by Eric Dumazet. *) Include a patch from Dave Taht to enable symbolic manipulation of IP_TOS values. *) Include a patch from Sachar Raindel to enable the omni tests to get ENOBUFS under Linux when the socket buffer is larger than the tx queue of the egress interface. This will help preclude netperf's reporting a larger than link-rate send-side figure. *) Fix a problem with late checking of the return from select() in src/netserver.c. Reported by Waqar Sheikh. *) A new global -Z option has been added to netperf and netserver. This takes as an argument a passphrase. In the case of netserver it will expect a control message with the passphrase as the first thing it receives on the control connection. If netserver does not receive a control message with the passphrase it will close the control connection and move-on. If the netserver receives a control message with a passprhase when it is not lookign for one, it will be ignored. There is at present a 20 second timeout on the attempted receipt of the request message. In the case of netperf, the passphrase will be the first thing sent on the control connection. There is no response to a passphrase control message. *) Demo mode output format will now track the omni output format. So, if the omni ouput format is CSV then the interim results will be emitted in csv. Likewise for keyval. If the mode is human (default and test-specific -O) then the output remains unchanged. Keyval output includes the count of interval, with a mind towards being able to source it in shells and whatnot. Subject to change without notice. *) A patch to correctly handle IPv6 addresses in the control messages, courtesy of Bjoern Zeeb. *) The global -F option can now be used specify a local and/or remote fill file. *) It is now possible to set/get the TCP congestion control algorithm being used by either end of the test connection when using the omni code. The output selectors are LOCAL_CONG_CONTROL and REMOTE_CONG_CONTROL and setting is via the test-specific -K option. *) Stop leaking file descriptors when looking-up probable egress interface names and I/O slot numbers. *) The global -Y option can be used to set IP_TOS on those platforms which support it. Since this is specific to IP (v4 or v6) it may move to a test-specific otion in the future. It is presently global for foolish consistency with the -y option to set SO_PRIORITY. *) The global -y option can be used to set SO_PRIORITY on those platforms which support it. Based on patches from Amir Vidai. *) The control message size has been increased from 256 bytes to 512 bytes. THIS WILL BREAK COMPATABILITY WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF NETPERF. However, we need more room on the pinhead on which the angels dance. *) Make the "sum" field of the histogram structure a 64 bit int to avoid having it wrap-around on tests where the sum of all the measured latencies was larger than 31 bits. This was causing statistics like stddev to go negative in some cases. *) If the time delta between two events is negative, do not bother doing any math with it in the histogram/statistics code, just increment the ridiculous count and move-on. *) Fixed a bug which caused local transport retransmissions to be reported as -1 even though the getsockopt() call was successful. (Linux). Later included remote transport retransmissions. *) The src/nettest_omni.c and re-written src/netserver.c code are now known to have compiled under Windows 7 x64 with the Microsoft WDK. There remains a timing issue with confidence intervals which is yet to be addressed, and may have been there for ages. Netserver has been run as a non-spawning (-f) server, netperf has been run, both have run "classic" and "omni" tests. These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.5.0 of netperf: *) Add a new -N option to netserver which will suppress all creation of debug files and so debugging output. While this would put a serious crimp in debugging a problem in netserver, it will enable folks using small embedded systems to avoid soaking-up their /tmp filesystem with clutter. *) A refactoring and partial re-write of the src/netserver.c code to untangle years of accumulated spaghetti code. Included is the ability to not daemonize netserver when launched from the command-line (-D) and also to not fork/spawn child processes upon the acceptance of a control connection (-f). Combined, the two options will cause netserver to remain in the forground and not spawn children - in effect netserver will handle only one test at a time. *) As it has been two years since the defect in Solaris getaddrinfo() was submitted, it should be the case that a fix is available, so it should no longer be necessary to "hide" the "Hey your platform's getaddrinfo() call is buggy" warning. Consequently, it is no longer being suppressed. *) A new global command line option - -S - has been added to enable setting of SO_KEEPALIVE on the data socket. This will affect the netperf side of the "classic" netperf tests, and will also affect the netserver side of an "omni" or migrated classic test as only the control message for the omni tests has the requisite flags field to communicate the desire to set SO_KEEPALIVE. Ostensibly, this may help when netperf is (ab)used in functional testing situations and netservers end-up orphaned and out in the cold because their corresponding netperfs went away and the notification was lost amid the roar of traffic over-saturating the interconnect(s). The default is to behave as before - SO_KEEPALIVE not set. *) Base on the frequency at which the author has used the functionality, the default for --enable-burst is now "yes." To disable support for burst mode one must now include a --enable-burst=no when performing the ./configure prior to compiling the bits. *) The output of the -D global command line option (./configure --enable-demo) has been enhanced to include seconds and milliseconds since the epoch as returned by a gettimeofday() call with a null pointer for the timezone. This is in support of being able to easily shove interim results into an rrdtool Round-Robin Database (RRD). *) The "omni" tests will be compiled-in by default, and WANT_MIGRATION is the default. One must ./configure with --enable-omni=no to disable this. *) When ./configured with --enable-intervals and intervals are actually used, the round-trip latency reported by an omni (or migrated classic) request/response test should better reflect reality rather than the length of the pacing interval. It and the MEAN_LATENCY from the histogram and -j output will still differ slightly and probably always will. *) The histogram code has been enhanced to track more than one latency at a time and so --enable-histogram and --enable-burst are now compatible - for the omni tests or migrated "classic" tests only however. This change was inspired/instigated by Jim Gettys and his work on overly-large queues of buffers *) WANT_MIGRATION is enabled when one specifies --enable-omni on the configure command line. *) Massage and encorporate a patch from Google that enables randomization of the IP addresses used in a test. An optional mask length in the standard '/' notation can be added to the end of the IP/name in the test-specific -H or -L options of an Omni test. *) Massage and include a DEBUG_LOG_FILE patch for Android from Josselin Costanzi *) Add intial attempt to report Slot ID on HP-UX 11.31. *) Add global -s option to cause omni tests to pause between setting-up the test and actually starting it. pause is in seconds. Poor man's way to (attempt to) avoid issues when starting many, Many, MANY concurrent netperf tests. Based on patches from Google. *) Additional timing statistics will be kept by the omni tests when the global "-j" option is specified. The additional statistics are min, max, mean, stddev and the 50th, 90th and 99th percentiles on the timings measured by histograms. Based on patches from Google. *) Add a workaround to get Linux to report TX queue drops in a UDP_STREAM test when the socket buffer size is larger than the TX queue. Provided by Andrew Gallatin. *) Fix the configure script to know it does not have to look for an SCTP library on FreeBSD 8.X *) The BSD and "omni" tests now have a test-specific -R option which is a boolean controlling whether or not SO_DONTROUTE will be set on the data socket. By default, any unidirectional UDP test will have SO_DONTROUTE set unless a -R 1 option is given. All other tests (including UDP request/response tests) will not have SO_DONTROUTE set unless a -R 0 option is given. This is put into place to make it take longer for blithering idiots to shoot themselves in the foot by running tests on setups they shouldn't. *) At least the beginnings of support for RDS, based on a circa 2007 patch against 2.4.2 by Vladimir Sokolovsky. Rather than create the "RDS_STREAM" test of his patch, the intention this time around is to enable RDS for the "omni" tests by using an omni test-specific -T rds specifyer for the "transport" to use. *) Missing fprintf format statements provided by Bruno Cornec *) Numerous cleanups from Jose Pedro Oliveira *) Fixes to allow netperf -H ::1 to work without having to add -6 or an AF_INET6 -L option These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.5 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) Fixes for Linux procstat-based CPU utilization on newer kernels from Andrew Gallatin. *) Fix for a TCP_RR hang from Michael Shuldman *) Compilation cleanups for MingW cnd MSDOS (djgpp) ourtesy of Gisle Vanem. *) Changes to enable compilation and building of netperf for VMware. Kudos to the person who did the first port, I will be happy to name that person when told it is OK :) *) Fixes from Adam Bidema for launching netserver children when the path to netserver.exe is very long. *) For the first time, netperf2 has a dependency, albeit optional, on another non-base-os bit of code - libsmbios under Linux. It will attept to detect this at compile time and use it to report the system model name in an omni test. If libsmbios is there we will try to use it, otherwise we will not. If the associated include file is also there (eg the -dev package in apt-get-speak), we will use it to get the prototype for SMBIOSGetSystemName, otherwise we make a guess as to the prototype for SMBIOSGetSystemName(), which is the only call we make to libsmbios. *) Fixes for BSD CPU utilization to deal with different BSD variants using different types. Courtesy of Simon Burge *) The "omni" suite has been added on an experimental basis. If it works-out then many of the tests in src/nettest_bsd.c, src/nettest_sdp.c, and src/nettest_sctp.c will be "migrated" to use the "omni infrastructure" (aka two routines to measure them all...). Apart from reduced socket code, the omni suite has user-configurable output in either "human readable," CSV or keyword=value format. By default, a VERY large quantity of data is output when asking for csv format (test-specific -o option) or keyword format (test-specific -k option). The omni suite is not yet documented (there are some as-yet undiagnosed problems with doc/netperf.texi in emacs texinfo mode and updating nodes and links and such - any help there would be appreciated) but there is a small text file in doc/ describing the names (most) of the available output's. For the most up-to-date list consult src/nettest_omni.c and the enum netperf_output_name. Or, you can pass-in a "filename" of '?' to either of the -O, -o or -k options and netperf will emit a list of the known available outputs. *) Coming along for the ride are some new platform specific files to determine the probable egress interface for each end of a test, as well as driver information for that interface. There is also reporting of "uname" like information for both local and remote system, and eventually perhaps something about the vendor's model name for the systems as well as the processor types. The end goal is to make it easy to get most if not all what one would want in a database of netperf results. *) The UDP_RR test now understands the global -f option to change output units. It also understands the -B option to tag results. Courtesy of Alexander Duyck. *) A fix has been added for hanging UDP_RR tests under Windows. Courtesy of Alexander Duyck. *) Use vfork() on those platforms without fork(), courtesy of Matt Waddel *) Track the bouncing interfaces that are linux processor affinity *) Fixes for Solaris sendfilev usage. *) A TCP_MSS test has been added which will report the MSS for a data connection setup as if the test were a TCP_STREAM test. While the remote (netserver) is tricked into thinking it is to accept a TCP_STREAM test, no actual data will flow over the connection. This means that if the MSS is one which might change over the life of the connection, it will not be reflected in the test output. Should this prove to be a problem a single send() can be arranged along with the return of the shutdown();recv() handshake. The idea is that this might be useful for netperf scripts wanting to parameterize things based on the MSS - for example the packet_byte_script. *) The width of the confidence interval can be specified in fractions of a percent for the confidence of a clean, close, comfortable calculation. :) *) Honor the global -B option in a TCP_SENDFILE test. *) Correct the sense of Send/Recv in the banner of a TCP_MAERTS test. These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.4 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) The LOC_CPU and REM_CPU tests will report their respective beliefs as to the number of CPUs present when the verbosity is set to more than one. This can be used when trying to diagnose issues with CPU utilization. *) A kind soul who wishes to remain anonymous provided a patch to enable use of sendfile() on OSX. *) Fix a misplaced \n in a format string of send_tcp_maerts, courtesy of Alexander Duyck. *) There is an experimental global -r option which will allow one to include CPU utilization measurements, but make the decision about hitting confidence based on the result only. The test banner will reflects this when -r is used. *) It is no longer necessary to specify a file with the global -F option when running a _SENDFILE test. Netperf will create a temporary file and populate it with random data and use that. If running aggregate tests it is strongly suggested one use a -F option. Otherwise, the overhead spent creating and populating the temporary file will be included in the CPU utilization calculation. *) The configure script recognizes Solaris 11 and selects the correct CPU utilization mechanism - or rather it selects the same mechanism as is used in Solaris 10. Fix courtesy of Andrew Gallatin. *) Convert a number of struct sockaddr_in's to struct sockaddr_storage's and add requisite casts to deal with some abort problems on Windows and perhaps other platforms as well. Kudos to Alexander Duyck. *) One can now pass a value of 'x' to the global -f option to specify the units as transactions per second. This is the default for any request/response test, which is determined by there being a "double `r'" in the name - eg "RR," "rr," "Rr," or "rR." At present only the TCP_RR test actually looks for this to be set. *) One can request bits/bytes per second as the primary output of a TCP_RR test by setting the global -f option to [kmgKMG] as with any of the "STREAM" tests. This converts the primary throughput metric to a bitrate (byterate) following the verbosity rules for a STREAM test. Service demand remains usec/Transaction regardless of the setting of the global -f option. A verbosity level of 2 or more will cause the TCP_RR test to report calculated average RTT latency, transaction rate, and inbound and outbound transfer rates regardless of the primary units selected with the global -f paramter. If the primary output is transactions per second, the reported inbound and outbound transfer rates will be 10^6 bits per second, otherwise, they honor the setting of the global -f option. All of this is EXPERIMENTAL and subject to change without prior notice in future versions of netperf. *) Replace "break" with "break 2" in acinclude.m4 for a socklen macro *) The default for the requested socket buffer size is changed from 0 to -1 to enable passing a value of 0 under Windows, which tells that stack one wishes to enable copy-avoidance. *) Call fflush() on each interim result displayed in demo mode to make things happier for folks redirecting same to a file. From Dan Yost. *) In theory each distinct netserver child will have a debug log with its pid appended to the name, somewhat like what appears to happen under Windows. *) A new global, command-line option to netperf and netserver has been added. The -V option will cause netperf/netserver to display its version and exit. *) Setting -I without setting -i will now implicitly set the iteration minimum and maximums as if a -i 10,3 were set. Also, some further sanity checking on the bounds for each is made. *) Fixed a typo in the manual (found by Emir Halepovic) so the description for the -s and -S options properly specifies they affect the data connection. These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.3 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) The UDP_STREAM test includes --enable-demo support, courtesy of patches from Scott Weitzenkamp. *) The nettest_dns.* files have been removed from the release and the repository. Those wishing to perform DNS server tests should migrate to netperf4 which has better support for DNS test. *) Fixes for compiling under Windows with Mingw/gcc courtesy of Gisle Vanem. *) A new global option - -N - has been added. When specified, this option will tell netperf to not bother to try to establish a control connection with a remote netserver. Instead, netperf will only attempt to make a data connection to the remote system. By default, this will be to the "discard" service for a "STREAM" or "SENDFILE" test, the "echo" service for a "RR" test and the "chargen" service for a "MAERTS" test. Any "remote" settings are changed to reflect their being unused in the test, and a "no control" tag is added to the test banner when -N is specified. This still needs to be propagated to other test files - at least for those for which it may make sense. *) The tests in nettest_bsd.c have been altered to not actually take timestamps and deltas in --enable-histogram unless the verbosity level has been set to actually display a histogram. This reduces the overhead measurably, even on systems with "fast" time calls, which _may_ mean that a future release of netperf may have histogram support enabled by default. This still needs to be propagated to other test files. Patches from the community would be most welcome :) *) Eliminate a bogus fprintf from the signal catching routine which was being executed when both intervals and demo mode were active at the same time. *) The nettest_ipv6.* files are no longer included in the source tar/zip file. IPv6 functionality has been subsumed into the nettest_bsd.* files for some time now. *) Use a higher resolution "time" source for HISTOGRAM support under Windows, courtesy of Spencer Frink. Prior to this it had no better than 10ms granularity which could lead to some rather strange looking results :) *) A bug fix reporting recv_size rather than send_size in TCP_MAERTS when CPU utilization was requested. *) A bug fix for buffer filling from a file to properly advance the buffer pointer when the file is smaller than the send buffer. *) Enable certain UDP tests which previously used unconnected sockets to use connected sockets. Courtesy of Shilpi Agarwal. *) The OSX CPU utilization code actually gets put into the tarball in a make dist now :) *) The check to make sure that getaddrinfo returned ai_protocol and/or ai_socktype's matching that which we requested is done for all socket and/or protocol types and a warning is emitted if it returns any which do not match. *) The linux CPU affinity code has been made capable of binding to CPU's >=32 on a 32-bit compilation and >=64 on a 64-bit compilation. *) More complete closing/redirecting of stdin/stdout/stderr/where in netserver to make it easier to launch netserver at the far-end of a remote shell. Courtesy of Hans Blom. *) Sendfile changes for Solaris courtesy of Andrew Gallatin. *) "spec" file support to generate RPMs courtesy of Martin Brown These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.2 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) Fixes for floating point format differences, courtesy of George Davis. *) Additions for CPU util support on MacOS X, courtesy of Anonymous. *) Processor affinity is now supported on AIX 5.3 (perhaps earlier) via the bindprocessor system call. *) Fixes for test lockups with TCP_CRR and TCP_CC under Windows courtesy of Dikon Reed. *) Fixes to netcpu_looper.c to get it to actually compile :) *) Have netcpu_looper use the bind_to_specific_processor() call provided by netlib since that knows about more platforms than the code in netcpu_looper did. The looper CPU binding will use a mapping to handle cases where the CPU id's on the system may not be a contiguous space starting from zero. At present, the code that setups the mapping only knows about retrieving actual CPU ids under HP-UX. *) The netcpu_sysctl method becomes calibration-free, courtesy of Andrew Gallatin These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.1 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) There is now a -B global command-line argument that will append its parameter as a string to the end of result lines when test banners have been suppressed. this is to make it easier to distinguish one result from another when aggregate restults are being run in parallel, without having to resort to having the individual results shell redirected to a file. This has been done for some of the tests in nettest_bsd.c, but not all of them, nor for the tests in the other nettest_mumble.c files. *) There is now an --enable-spin configure option that will enable intervals if not already enabled and will have the sender sit and spin in a tight loop until time for the next interval rather than wait for an interval timer to expire. This means it should be possible to have a much finer granularity on the interval, at the expense of an EXTREME increase in CPU utilization. (To the extent I'm considering disabling measurement of local CPU utilization when that mode is enabled, and bursts have been requested - your feedback on that topic would be most appreciated) If only --enable-intervals is used with configure, the old set the interval timer and wait method is still used. If --enable-spin is configured, the test banner will include "spin intervals" rather than the "intervals" from a plain --enable-intervals. The sit and spin will either use gettimeofday(), or gethrtime() if gethrtime() is available. This has been implemented in the tests of nettest_bsd.c but none of the others. Volunteers would be most welcome. I would entertain the notion of making the implementation a series of inline functions in netlib. This holds true for the demo mode - why will become clear when you look at nettest_bsd.c. While things are considerably cleaner than they were before, with reuse within nettest_bsd.c, there is no resuse with the rest of the nettest_mumble.c files. *) the -w option for the interval time now takes three optional suffixes. if the suffix is 'm' (eg 10m) it will assume the user has specified time in units of milliseconds. if the suffix is 'u' it will assume microseconds, and if 's' seconds. no suffix remains milliseconds for backwards compatability with previous netperf versions. *) It should be possible to successfully compile with --enable-intervals. These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.1 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) netcpu_pstatnew.c has been altered to workaround a bug in the interrupt cycle accounting in HP-UX 11.23 that is not expected to be resolved until a later release. basically, some interrupt time is not counted, which means the sum of idle, user, kernel and interrupt is less than the cycles per second multiplied by the elapsed time. the workaround preserves the "no calibration required" nature of the pstatnew CPU utilization mechanism. you can see more in netcpu_pstatnew.c and/or in debug output. *) in netlib.c recv_response has been renamed recv_response_timed(addl_time) which is now used in calibrate_remote_cpu in place of the "sleep(40);recv_response()" sequence. This then allows the REM_CPU test to complete in less than 40 seconds when the remote's CPU utilization mechanism does not require calibration. The value of "addl_time" is added to the tc_sec field of the select() timeout. A "new" recv_response has been added that simply calls recv_response_timed(0) - this is to minimize the number of changes needed elsewhere in the code. *) hopefully, this release fixes problems people have been having with the configure script failing when picking a type for socklen_t. now, instead of generating an error, it emits a warning and simply tries socklen_t *) the configure script no longer looks for the size of an in_port_t *) netlib.c now has code to perform processor binding for Tru64, but the configure script may or may not detect it correctly. This means that one may have to edit the config.h file by hand to get the functionality. *) it is known that netperf will compile under Windows XP and 2003 using the DDK it is possible that netperf 2.4.1 will compile on a Windows system under VC++/Visual Studio. It might even work!-) See the README.window file for additional details. Things _NOT_ changed in this release: *) The automagic determination of the number and type of parameters to sched_setaffinity under Linux remains brittle at best. These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.4.0 of netperf: Things changed in this release: *) Netperf has been converted to use a configure script. Yes boys and girls, after 12 years of distributing netperf with just a makefile I have finally bitten the bullet and cast my fate to autoconf, automake, etc. To get the most basic netperf built all you should need to do is: cd to the netperf directory ./configure make and perhaps make install (Note, I've not done much with make install - I'm hemming and hawing over what the default installation location should be) Please keep in mind that this is the first time I've tried to use autoconf et al. I am sure there are things that should be done differently and would welcome any and all constructive criticisms. I suspect there are several places where I've not fully demonstrated being of the autoconf body - particulary as pertains to include files being in "#if mumble #endif" blocks. Fixes would be most welcome. *) Speaking of becomming one with various GNU tools, work on a new netperf manual has begun, with the source being a texinfo document that is converted to "all" the other formats. This resides in doc/ . *) The platform-specific parts of CPU utilization measurement have been broken-out into separate .c files and selected at configure time a la the pcap_mumble files of tcpdump. This makes src/netlib.c _much_ easier to read and the addition of new CPU utilization mechanisms much easier. *) New HP-UX 11.23 and Solaris 10 CPU utilization measurement mechanisms (called pstatnew and kstat10 respectively) need no calibration step. Both have variations on microstate accounting. HP-UX 11.23 still identifies the method in the headers as 'P' for pstat. The kstat10 method is identified as 'M' for Microstate. Scripts which make calibration runs with LOC_CPU and REM_CPU may continue to do so, they will just run forty to eighty seconds faster on platforms with the calibration-free CPU util mechanisms. *) Automatic detection of CPU utilization mechanism for HP-UX, Linux, AIX, *BSD and Solaris. If you do not like what the configure script selects, you can use --enable-cpuutil= . *) The "times" (aka 'T') CPU utilization mechanism has been removed. It was never very accurate at all, only showing CPU time charged to the process, and with interrupts and other network processing it is rarely chaged to a or the correct process. It and other methods may remain in the format_cpu_method() routine of src/netlib.c for historical purposes only. *) CAVEAT - the "kstat" mechanism is KNOWN TO BE BOGUS for Solaris. It does not include time spent processing interrupts, and networking benchmarks will generate at least a few of those... This affects _ALL_ versions of Solaris with kstat. So, do NOT trust any CPU util figures where netperf says the method was 'K' for kstat - unless perhaps it reports 100% CPU util. Solaris 10 takes a step in the right direction adding microstate accounting similar to what netperf uses on HP-UX 11.23. HOWEVER, Solaris 10's accounting for user/kernel/idle is done in _parallel_ with interrupt, which means they overlap. Doubleplusungood. Netperf attempts to compensate for that with some handwaving (src/netcpu_kstat10.c) *) Initial support for SCTP has been added with the SCTP_STREAM and SCTP_RR tests. These tests use the libsctp mechanisms for increased portability. It has been explained that libsctp should not impart all that much overhead and it does make things rather simpler. *) Netperf now uses getaddrinfo() to resolve hostnames and IP addresses. A replacement getaddrinfo() is provided for those platforms where the configure script cannot tell that getaddrinfo is present. There are cases where a host's getaddrinfo call may return results that ignore the hints for protocol. Netperf catches these and reports a warning so you can pester your OS source for fixes. Solaris getaddrinfo() seems to return results with SCTP procotol cleared. Mac OS X getaddrinfo botches when the service/port is specified as "0" so one must specify a port number on the netperf command line. AIX 5.something getaddrinfo has a different but similar problem with "0" as a port/service name as well. Linux 2.6 and HP-UX 11i getaddrinfo seem to be fine - at least as far as netperf goes :) *) A "Demo Mode" has been added to the main BSD Sockets/TCP/UDP tests: TCP_STREAM, TCP_MAERTS, TCP_SENDFILE, TCP_RR, TCP_CC, TCP_CRR and UDP_RR. It has not been added to UDP_STREAM. This mode is enabled with --enable-demo when configuring netperf, which activates a global "-D" option. By default, -D will cause interim results (throughput or transactions/s only, not CPU util) from the netperf's perspective to be emitted no sooner than once per second. An optional parameter can specify another interval in units (floating point) of seconds: -D 1.5 will make the reporting interval at least 1.5 seconds. This mode makes no use of explicit interval timers since that can be so, well fun on different platforms. Instead, an initial guess of how many units of work must be done to consume the desired reporting interval is made, and that guess is refined throughout the entire test. If something happens to dramatically slow-down the test, the reproting interval may become must larger for a few intervals. When things speed-up it is detected very quickly. As with the --enable-historgram support, if gethrtime() is available on the platform, it will be used in lieu of gettimeofday(). In any case, the number of calls to gettimeofday()/gethrtime() is much, Much, MUCH smaller than for --enable-histogram so while there may be a measurable effect on the results, it should be rather small. *) The global -H option has been enhanced to take an optional address family specification for the control connection: -H , Unlike other comma-separated options, where specifying only one thing will set both, here specifying only one thing will be ass-u-me-d to be the and will leave defaulted (AF_UNSPEC). Family can be specified as "4" or "inet" for AF_INET, "6" or "inet6" for AF_INET6. *) A new global -L option has been added to specify the local name/IP and/or address family for the control connection: -L , Unlike other comma-separated options, where specifying only one thing will set both, here specifying only one thing will be ass-u-me-d to be the and will leave defaulted (AF_UNSPEC). Family can be specified as "4" or "inet" for AF_INET, "6" or "inet6" for AF_INET6. *) Test-specific -H and -L options are present for the TCP, UDP and SCTP tests, which are now (intended to be) IP protocol version agnostic. *) Global -4 and -6 options will set the both the local and remote address family to either AF_INET or AF_INET6 respectively. *) Test-specific -4 and -6 options have been added for TCP, UDP and SCTP tests. *) Since the basic TCP UDP and SCTP tests are no longer IPv4-only, the nettest_ipv6.[ch] files are only included in the source distribution for historical interest. *) The main test banners for the TCP, UDP and SCTP tests have been enhanced to give both local and remote addressing information for the data connection. *) Compilation under Windows is likely FUBAR at this point. I _hope_ to start trying to do builds under the DDK soon, but am not sure when I'll be able to start. Any and all assistance you can give there would be most welcome. *) Various and sundry fixes. TCP_RR should no longer go into an infinite loop when you abort netperf. I'm sure there are others. *) Unix domain socket tests are compiled-in with --enable-unix=yes at configure time. *) DLPI tests are compiled-in with --enable-dlpi=yes at configure time. *) XTI tests are compiled-in with --enable-xti=yes at configure time. Things not changed in this release: *) Seems like everything has changed :) These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.3pl2 of netperf: Things changed in this release *) One can bind netperf or netserver to specific CPUs with the -T option. This is a generalization of some HP-UX and netserver specific work from 2.3pl1. *) Extend the kludge to workaround the Linux setsockopt/getsockopt bizzarreness to the socket buffer sizes for the remote side in addition to the local side. *) Fix the lack of initialization of times_up in recv_tcp_maerts() that caused confidence intervals to fail miserably. *) Other misc fixes - than you to all of you who sent them. These are the Release Notes for revision 2.3pl1 of netperf: Things changed in this release *) The bind() call in create_data_socket() in the file nettest_bsd.c is no longer conditional on the user's specifying an IP address or port number to which the data socket should be bound. This fixes the "connection refused" errors in the UDP tests. *) Some experimental code to allow one to specify a CPU to which the remote netserver should be bound. This is intended to allow one to get greater certainty (as in confidence intervals) on SMP systems. At present the functionality is HP-UX specific. Submittals of changes for a more general approach are welcomed. These are the Release Notes for revision 2.3 of netperf: Things changed in this release *) The user can now specify local and/or remote port numbers for the data connection using the -P test-specific option. This is to support those folks who want to run netperf through those evil, end-to-end-breaking things known as firewalls... :) This changes the format of some of the control messages, hence the bump in the update number in the VUF. While it may be possible to mix 2.3 and pre-2.3 netperf and netserver, it is not supported. *) The user can now specify local and/or remote IP addresses for the data connection using the -I test-specific option. This is to support those folks who want to run netperf through those evil, end-to-end-breaking things known as firewalls... :) This changes the format of some of the control messages, hence the bump in the update number in the VUF. While it may be possible to mix 2.3 and pre-2.3 netperf and netserver, it is not supported. *) Set DL_mumble message priorities in the DLPI tests *) Fix error return check for getaddrinfo() *) Those systems with gethrtime() can define -DHAVE_GETHRTIME to use gethrtime() instead of gettimeofday() and reduce the measurement overhead when enabling the -DHISTOGRAM functionality. *) The default for -DHISTOGRAM compilation now adds a UNIT_USEC and TEN_USEC row and renames TENTH_MSEC to HUNDRED_USEC. If you want the old behaviour add -DOLD_HISTOGRAM to CFLAGS. *) Add missing '!' in the recv_udp*_stream so we recognize the end of a timed test correctly. *) Replace "||" with "&&" to fix an infinite loop in recv_tcp_conn_rr() most likely introduced in 2.2pl5. *) Code has been added to kludge around the bug in Linux getsockopt() where it almost always returns twice the value for which one asks unlike virtually every other stack on the face of the planet. This was doing some unpleasant things to tests in which confidence intervals were requested. Things not changed in this release *) Lots :) These are the Release Notes for revision 2.2pl5 of netperf: Things changed in this release *) Improved (perhaps even usable :) support for Windows, including compilation and run on Win64. *) Fixes for MacOS X and FreeBSD Things not changed in this release *) Specifying the port number(s) for the data connection These are the Release Notes for Revision 2.2pl4 of netperf: Things changed in this release *) USE_SYSCTL available on suitable FreeBSD releases to measure CPU utilization without having to resort to -DUSE_LOOPER. *) Include Solaris 9 with the Linux sendfile path under -DHAVE_SENDFILE This still outstanding in this release *) Knowing why signals are not interrupting socket calls under OpenVMS. A quick try to use threads for timing a la Win32 worked, but also cut performance in half. Any and all assistance in this area would be most welcome. These are the Release Notes for revisoin 2.2pl3 of netperf: Things changed in this release *) I started practicing what I preach and will set SO_REUSEADDR before netserver tries to bind to its well-known port. *) Initial port to OpenVMS. This includes support for the OVMS Auxilliary server (inetd replacement). See README.ovms for more details on what is involved in compiling and running netperf under OpenVMS. *) Testname comparisons are now case insensitive. This is a side effect of OpenVMS downshifting commandlines to lowercase. I made the change and decided it was OK to keep it that way, even though for OpenVMS one _has_ to set the right defines to disable that downshifting or the command-line options will not work. For example "-H" will become "-h" which isn't quite the same thing... *) Misc fixes for nettest_ipv6.c. *) Support for sendfile() under Linux Thins I would like to have changed but did not know how or didn't have time: *) Allow netserver to run as a standalone daemon under OpenVMS *) Allow netserver to run as a standalone daemon under Windows *) Rediscover an inetd-like facility for Windows *) Figure-out how to get low-overhead, accurate, per-CPU utilization figures under OpenVMS *) Get the UDP_RR and UDP_STREAM tests to work under OpenVMS, and get the TCP_RR test to work based on time rather than transaction count. There is some bug (possibly in OpenVMS?) where the SIGALRM fires, but a socket call will not return an EINTR. Things that changed prior to this release: *) Addition of the TCP_MAERTS test - this is a TCP_STREAM test where the data flows from the netserver to the netperf rather than from the netperf to the netserver. This can be useful in those situations where netperf (netserver) is installed on a remote system, but the tester has no shell access and wishes to get performance data for the path from netserver to netperf. These are the Release Notes for the 2.2 revision of netperf: Things changed in this release *) Various and sundry bugs fixed (in theory) for platforms such as FreeBSD and Linux. If I left-out your bug fix, it was purely accidental - my mind has a very small cache, and sometimes I will "lose" email in the shuffle. *) Initial support for sendfile() on HP-UX. This test will use the sendfile() call instead of send() to send data to the remote. Netperf "lies" to netserver and calls it a TCP_STREAM test since what netserver needs to do is exactly the same. A future patch may change that and simply have netserver call the same routine for both test types. Kudos to Charles Harris for the initial prototype. *) The Fore ATM API and HiPPI tests have been dropped from the distribution. Things I would have liked to have changed, but did not have time for: *) Conversion of the source and makefile to use the GNU configure/autoconf utility to make it easier for folks to build by not having to edit makefiles... You will notice that I have started to switch from "DO_MUMBLE" to "HAVE_MUMBLE" as always - happy benchmarking, rick jones --------------------------------------------------------------------- These are the Release Notes for the 2.1pl3 revision of netperf: *) An OBOB (Off By One Bug) in netlib.c that was causing a core dump on Irix should be fixed. *) Irix systems should now be able to determine the number of CPU's present automagically (code from outside, not tested yet because I have no MP Irix systems at my disposal) *) An alpha version of a TCP_CC test has been added - this is a TCP_CRR test with out the "RR." *) The -Ae has been removed from the default makefile. If someone has a nice way to automagically generate the correct makefile for different platforms I would like to learn how. happy benchmarking, rick jones ---------------------------------------------------------------------- These are the Release Notes for the 2.1 revision of netperf: Things Changed in this release: *) The XTI (Version 2 of the spec) tests are now documented in the manual. *) The TCP_CRR (Connect Request/Response) test is now documented in the manual, including a description of how it mimics the behaviour of http (the protocol underlying the WWW). *) Support for for Windows NT 3.51 OS in the BSD Sockets tests (ok, so they are really Winsock in that case :). Other test suites may be ported as required/desired/appropriate. *) Tests for TCP and UDP, using the IPv6 extensions to BSD sockets are included in this release. They are included by adding -DUSE_IPv6 to the makefile and recompiling. *) Support for a "long long" datatype should only be required for -DUSE_PSTAT compilation which is an HP-UX only thing. The *unbundled* HP compilers from at least "HP92453-01 A.09.61 HP C Compiler" and later should have the required support. The bundled compiler may not. GCC should work - check the archives listed in the comp.sys.hp.hpux FAQ for copies. The FAQ is archived on rtfm.mit.edu under the path pub/usenet/comp.sys.hp.hpux. *) A "proper" fix for double data type alignment has been included. *) A new script is included with this release which can be used to measure aggregate TCP_RR performance (multiple, concurrent instances of the TCP_RR test). A related use of this script would be measuring MP scaling. A single-byte TCP_RR test is good for this purpose for two reasons: 1) it excercises the control/protocol paths heavily without using much in the way of data copies which may be easier to scale. 2) most systems can easily saturate cards with bandwidth, but not so easily with request/response Of course, feedback on this is most welcome. *) When measuring CPU utilization, the units for service demand have been changed from milliseconds (designated ms) of CPU per unit (KB or Transaction) to microseconds (desginated us). *) For accurate reporting of service demand, netperf needs to know the number of CPU's present on a system. On some systems (HP-UX), this is automatic. For others (All), it is necessary to add a global "-n " option to both netperf and netserver. !! IF THIS IS LEFT-OUT CPU UTILIZATION AND SERVICE DEMAND FOR !! !! MULTI-PROCESSOR SYSTEMS WILL BE WRONG. !! If you know of ways to programatically determine the number of active CPUs on a system, please let the author Rick Jones know. *) other things I've probably forgotten :) Things Not Changed in this release: *) The ancillary test suites are essentially unchanged - DLPI, HiPPI/LLA, Unix Domain, and Fore ATM API. Unless there is much interest expressed in these tests, 2.1 may be the last release in which they are included. The order of retirement would likely be Unix Domain, HiPPI/LLA, Fore ATM API, and then DLPI. Miscelaneous Comments: *) The -DUSE_LOOPER CPU utilization _seems_ to be nice and low-impact on HP-UX, Digital Unix, and IRIX. It does not yet seem to be low-impact on Solaris (I need an example of priocntl usage), AIX (setpri only works if you are root), and NT (not sure of the reason). Help with those problems would be most appreciated.