Benchmarking RandomX on Mac

I wanted to test my MBP CPU out on the incoming Monero algorithm RandomX but there are no builds for Mac and I wasn’t in the mood to try and compile from source on Mac. Docker to the rescue!

Install Docker Desktop https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop

Fire up an Ubuntu 18.04 container

docker run -it ubuntu:18.04 bash

Install all a few bits and bobs

apt-get update && apt-get install -y wget unzip

Download the precompiled RandomX benchmark for Linux. The releases can be found here https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/releases

wget https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/releases/download/v1.0.4/RandomX-benchmark-linux-x64-v1.0.4.zip && unzip RandomX-benchmark-linux-x64-v1.0.4.zip && chmod +x ./randomx-benchmark

Try it out

./randomx-benchmark --help

You should see help output

Supported options:
  --help        shows this message
  --mine        mining mode: 2080 MiB
  --verify      verification mode: 256 MiB
  --jit         x86-64 JIT compiled mode (default: interpreter)
  --largePages  use large pages
  --softAes     use software AES (default: x86 AES-NI)
  --threads T   use T threads (default: 1)
  --affinity A  thread affinity bitmask (default: 0)
  --init Q      initialize dataset with Q threads (default: 1)
  --nonces N    run N nonces (default: 1000)
  --seed S      seed for cache initialization (default: 0)

There are some drawbacks, namely without some extra effort you won’t be able to use the --largePages option.