Pine phone eMMC read speeds ?

[LinAdmin2]

When you need a more powerful system you must chose a more powerful CPU and more RAM.

that depend on your definition of powerful system. the storage device is a bottleneck in system I/O performance. a faster flash will decrease boot and application laoding times. cpu and ram won't be able to help decrease loading times.

Politeness prevents me to comment on your last sentence.

[ak42]

that depend on your definition of powerful system. the storage device is a bottleneck in system I/O performance. a faster flash will decrease boot and application laoding times. cpu and ram won't be able to help decrease loading times.
Politeness prevents me to comment on your last sentence.

sorry what ? no need to be rude.
I meant CPU and RAM won't be able to help decrease application loading times.

[dukla2000]

Right I got my 1.2b 32Gb board today and have been running some iozone benchmarks. They are quite interesting IMHO! The full results are at the end of this post, in the course of this post I will highlight selected extracts.

I have posted the results (always kBytes/sec) for 4  different "disks" and will always quote them in the following order:
Evo+ - a 32Gb Samsung SDcard I have and that was used to boot Mobian (circa 20201115) for all the tests
v1.1 - my 16Gb eMMC BraveHeart
v1.2a - my 16Gb eMMC Community Edition
v1.2b - my 32Gb eMMC Community Edition

...
85-88 MiB/s  for the 16gb eMMC
65 MiB/s  for the 32gb eMMC
and 23 MiB/s read speed for the sd card.

OK - if I may be so bold as to surmise @megous reason for his report, he is concerned (in this instance) with the load time of an OS image using p-boot. So the maximum sequential read speed of a large file is relevant, and the numbers I got for 8M sequential reads are
22858, 81270, 82412, 73194
Which is pretty damn close to what @megous reported for SDcard and both 16Gb mobos. My 32Gb wasn't quite as poor as expected. As per my previous post my 1.1 BraveHeart eMMC is definitely Kimtigo. I was unable to read the chip details on my 1.2b board as it is covered by thermal tape that separated when I tried to lift it so I got cold feet, but would be pretty sure my 1.2b eMMC is NOT Kimtigo as their 32Gb eMMC should perform at least as well as their 16Gb according to the datasheet.

...

1) Will this give noticeable difference to performance in normal phone use ?
     is the eMMC speed listed the maximum for that device     
         or a product of its interaction with the phone hardware.?
...

Aah - the $1m question! As always "it depends"!!!
In general the folklore I believe says that the small file random speed of the disk is what is closest aligned to the user experience for a linux root file system. So in my results the 4k random read speeds are
5848, 7459, 8229, 6796
and the 4k random write speeds are
2804, 3310, 12499, 7705

Again the 1.2b 32Gb eMMC is slower than the 1.2a 16Gb eMMC. But the 1.1 16Gb eMMC is closer to the SDcard speed, especially for writes!

Clearly the v1.1 16Gb eMMC performance is radically different to the v1.2a 16Gb eMMC and I am not sure why. AFAIK there is nothing in the wiki mobo deltas that should cause this in terms of hardware. Far more likely the OS device tree for the BraveHeart is being much more gentle?

While the 1.2a 16Gb seems to be "king", it does have a bizarre result for 8M sequential write speed, that is significantly worse than its performance for 512k sequential writes. 512k sequential write speeds are
21238, 20202, 55618, 59405
and 8m sequential write speeds
21550, 14631, 12125, 64409

The v1.1 16Gb also displays this same behaviour so it is not a freak result - there seems to be some issue with the 16Gb chips! I suspect it is something to do with the eMMC controller or buffers: the datasheet does not identify any differences (I can see) between the 16Gb and 32Gb in these areas so in theory it is down to the NAND type (which I doubt)! So for this use case the 1.2b 32Gb eMMC is "king". Hell, even the SDcard does better! Note the 32Gb also hammers the 16Gb for 512k and 8M random writes - if I could think of a use-case that this is relevant for then for sure the 32Gb would be first choice

For sure the 4k sequential I/O highlights that eMMC is preferable to even a fast/good SDcard (the Evo+ is the best card I have tested for 4k I/O) if that is what will affect your SBC/linux experience (other than OS boot/load times )

To answer the second part of your question - according to the Kimtigo datasheet the results I have from iozone are reasonably below the capabilities of their chips. This is pretty much understandable as we have the Allwinner IO architecture and timing in the mix, let alone "firmware" settings in the device tree.

If you got this far I thank you for reading my ramblings!

Evo+ (32Gb)

Code:

$ sudo iozone -e -I -s 100m -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 8m -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
    Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
            Version $Revision: 3.489 $
        Compiled for 64 bit mode.
        Build: linux

...
                                                              random    random                                   
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4     1960     2640     6172     5911     5848     2804                                                               
          102400      16     7558     8870    11241    11603    11762    10002                                                               
          102400     512    21238    21195    22916    22935    22930    21266                                                               
          102400    8192    21550    21546    22858    23028    22890    21530                                                               

iozone test complete.

v1.1 (16Gb)

Code:

$ sudo iozone -e -I -s 100m -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 8m -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
    Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
            Version $Revision: 3.489 $
        Compiled for 64 bit mode.
        Build: linux

...
                                                              random    random                                 
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4     2165     2311     8243     8305     7459     3310                                                               
          102400      16     5354     5976    23656    23246    23115     5027                                                               
          102400     512    20202    14158    77561    77940    77202    16872                                                               
          102400    8192    14631    21527    81270    81283    81430    14420                                                               

iozone test complete.

v1.2a (16Gb)

Code:

$ sudo iozone -e -I -s 100m -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 8m -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
    Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
            Version $Revision: 3.489 $
        Compiled for 64 bit mode.
        Build: linux

...
                                                              random    random                                   
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4    11621    13706     9959    10084     8229    12499                                                               
          102400      16    25352    26295    28018    28246    24565    25365                                                               
          102400     512    55618    35053    79352    79441    78907    29963                                                               
          102400    8192    12125    18412    82412    82490    81646    14353                                                               

iozone test complete.

v1.2b (32Gb)

Code:

$ sudo iozone -e -I -s 100m -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 8m -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
    Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
            Version $Revision: 3.489 $
        Compiled for 64 bit mode.
        Build: linux

...
                                                              random    random                                   
              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread    read     write
          102400       4     7688     9257     6881     6789     6796     7705                                                               
          102400      16    21450    23991    14318    14063    13714    22710                                                               
          102400     512    59405    61647    53064    52832    54664    61371                                                               
          102400    8192    64409    65939    73194    66235    66408    66017                                                               

iozone test complete.

[wibble]

Thanks bcnaz for the link - I've looked at that page many times but not at the SD/eMMC part.
Thanks dukla2000 for the detailed test results.

[LinAdmin2]

@dukla2000 

If you got this far I thank you for reading my ramblings!

It's on my side to thank you for sharing such thorough investigation.


My conclusion:
It all depends and may change on minor differences in design. You must do measurements to get reliable results.