QEMU User Mode Benchmarking

Ever wondered which QEMU emulator is the fastest? So did I, so I made this benchmark. It runs a Sieve of Eratosthenes on each of Go's supported Linux target architectures using QEMU User Mode Emulation.

Requirements

• Linux
• QEMU with User Mode Emulation (binfmt_misc) support enabled
• Go
• Python 3
• hyperfine
• matplotlib

Usage

git clone https://github.com/ostrich/QEMUUserModeBenchmark.git && cd QEMUUserModeBenchmark

make build

make bench

make summary

make chart

Optional: make all runs the full pipeline (build, bench, summary, chart).

Files

• main.go: A Sieve of Eratosthenes. Calculates primes up to 25 million and prints the count.
• architectures.txt: List of Go Linux target architectures to build and benchmark.
• Makefile: Build/benchmark pipeline. Outputs binaries to bin/ and benchmark results to results/.
• summary.py: Parses JSON and prints results to stdout.
  • --format text: Default. Prints a simple table to stdout.
  • --format csv: Prints a CSV to stdout.
  • --format markdown: Prints a markdown table to stdout.
• chart.py: Uses matplotlib to generate results.png from the JSON output.

My results

Run on an AMD 5900X with 64 GiB RAM.

Architecture	Mean (s)	StdDev (s)
386	0.079670	0.008981
amd64	0.052152	0.006544
arm	0.371544	0.018007
arm64	0.323212	0.024882
loong64	0.250286	0.008166
mips	0.335044	0.018365
mips64	0.355363	0.022990
mips64le	0.337094	0.011313
mipsle	0.330756	0.009971
ppc64	0.357804	0.015372
ppc64le	0.354349	0.016179
riscv64	0.283564	0.013114
s390x	0.526608	0.018216