Author: J Battles
Date: 19:30:07 08/30/04
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Basical bogomips is Bogus meaningless indicator or performance
From: http://www.clifton.nl/
2.1 What are BogoMips
Quoted from the Internet, origin unknown but brought to the attention by Eric S
Raymond esr@thyrsus.com, and Geoff Mackenzie freon@dialstart.net, there is an
humourously illustrative definition of BogoMips as ''the number of million times
per second a processor can do absolutely nothing.''
On a more precise basis, from Lars Wirzenius' wirzeniu@kruuna.Helsinki.FI mail
of 9 September 1993, explaining Bogomips, with additional detailed information
by Alessandro Rubini, rubini@morgana.systemy.it, and by Wim van Dorst:
`MIPS is short for Millions of Instructions Per Second. It is a measure for
the computation speed of a program. Like most such measures, it is more often
abused than used properly (it is very difficult to justly compare MIPS for
different kinds of computers).
BogoMips are Linus's invention. The kernel (or was it a device driver?)
needs a timing loop (the time is too short and/or needs to be too exact for a
non-busy-loop method of waiting), which must be calibrated to the processor
speed of the machine. Hence, the kernel measures at boot time how fast a certain
kind of busy loop runs on a computer. "Bogo" comes from "bogus", i.e, something
which is a fake. Hence, the BogoMips value gives some indication of the
processor speed, but it is way too unscientific to be called anything but
BogoMips.
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