torvalds/test-tlb

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1050 stars · 221 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A small C benchmark tool by Linus Torvalds that measures memory access latency and TLB behavior across working-set sizes from a few kilobytes to hundreds of megabytes, including hugepage tests via madvise. It is a quick hack with hardcoded constants (page size, CPU frequency, stride) that users are expected to tweak for their machine.

Use cases

• measure memory latency across cache hierarchy levels
• test TLB performance with different page sizes
• benchmark hugepage vs normal page memory access
• measure cache line effects with different strides
• estimate memory access latency in CPU cycles
• compare memory latency on different machines

When to choose

• you want a tiny, hackable microbenchmark for memory latency and TLB behavior on Linux
• you want to experiment with strides, random chains, and hugepages to understand your machine's memory hierarchy

When to avoid

• you need polished, automated benchmarking with noise reduction or statistical reporting
• you need a portable tool - hugepage tests rely on Linux-specific madvise behavior
• you want a benchmark that works out of the box without editing hardcoded constants

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

benchmarking developer-tools performance hardware developer-tools operating-systems cli c cpp memory-latency tlb microbenchmark cache-testing hugepages hardware-performance linux

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