BogoMips
unscientific measurement of CPU speed made by the Linux kernel
BogoMips (from "bogus" and MIPS) is a crude measurement of CPU speed made by the Linux kernel when it boots to calibrate an internal busy-loop. An often-quoted definition of the term is "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing".
BogoMips is a value that can be used to verify whether the processor in question is in the proper range of similar processors, i.e. BogoMips represents a processor's clock frequency as well as the potentially present CPU cache. It is not usable for performance comparisons among different CPUs.
History
In 1993, Lars Wirzenius posted a Usenet message explaining the reasons for its introduction in the Linux kernel on comp.os.linux:
[...]
MIPS is short for Millions of Instructions Per Second. It is a measure for the computation speed of a processor. 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 own invention. The linux kernel version 0.99.11 (dated 11 July 1993) needed 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “BogoMips” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.