[netperf-dev] Need testing/review for netperf 2.4.3

[Rick Jones]

After a bit of a delay, I believe I am once again ready to release 
another version of netperf - netperf 2.4.3.  There are a number of 
changes in 2.4.3 over and beyond 2.4.2.

Apart from the changes listed below, I have also made some moderate 
updates to the manual and I would like your feedback on that.  You can 
take your pick of format from the files at:

http://www.netperf.org/svn/netperf2/trunk/doc/

Here is an excerpt from the Release_Notes:

*) 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.  Paranoia keeps the Netperf
    Contributing Editor from removing it from the top of trunk of the
    source repository until after he can do a bit more reading about
    subversion :)

*) 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

If you can grab the bits with your subversion client from the repository:

http://www.netperf.org/svn/netperf2/trunk/

and kick the tires a bit on your platform(s) of choice and let me know 
how it goes, I would appreciate it.  If you do not have a subversion 
client, please contact me directly, and I will send you either a tar or 
zip file with the sources contained therein.

happy benchmarking,

rick jones