Three changes that together let ARM hardware appear on the leaderboard honestly.
Shipping them separately would leave ARM half-supported either way: without the
image a Pi cannot submit at all, and without the architecture field it submits
but is indistinguishable from x86.
1. PIN THE OFFICIAL MULTI-ARCH SYSBENCH IMAGE
severalnines/sysbench publishes amd64 only, so ARM hosts could not run the
System Benchmark at all — not a graceful failure, the container simply cannot
execute. Apple Silicon could only run it under Rosetta emulation, which distorts
the measurement it is taking, and that is what drove a community macOS fork to
substitute a different benchmark and submit incomparable numbers.
Swaps to ghcr.io/crosstalk-solutions/nomad-sysbench (Debian 12 + sysbench
1.0.20+ds-5, built for linux/amd64 + linux/arm64). One digest covers both
architectures; verified that pulling the pinned manifest-list digest resolves to
arm64 on a Raspberry Pi 5 and amd64 on x86, and that RepoDigests reports the
same manifest-list digest on both — so a single allowlist entry serves both.
No rescoring: 1.0.17 -> 1.0.20 measured 1.25% apart on identical hardware with
identical flags (7170.18 vs 7259.56 events/sec), inside run-to-run noise and
~0.3% on a composite. Both digests are allowlisted server-side, so the fleet can
cross over gradually.
2. REPORT THE DIGEST ACTUALLY RESOLVED
The submission previously sent SYSBENCH_DIGEST, the constant the client was
compiled with. The leaderboard validates that field, but a constant attests to
how a client was BUILT rather than what it RAN, so any build inherits a valid
value simply by carrying the same source.
Now reads it back from the image. Uses RepoDigests (the manifest digest we
pulled by), never Id — Id is the config digest, differs per architecture, and
would never match the allowlist. Falls back to the constant if inspection yields
nothing usable, so a benchmark never fails over provenance metadata.
Still forgeable, and always will be with an open-source client. It moves the bar
from "no effort" to "deliberate", which is the distinction that matters when
judging whether a submission is a mistake or a choice.
3. RECORD CPU ARCHITECTURE AND OS
The leaderboard is a single board across instruction sets by design, with
disclosure as the fairness mechanism. Without an architecture field an ARM result
sits unlabelled beside x86 — exactly what the disclosure exists to prevent.
All three fields come from the Docker daemon, reusing the docker.info() call
_detectRunEnvironment already makes. That is deliberate: inside the admin
container os.arch() and si.osInfo() describe the CONTAINER, not the host being
benchmarked.
cpu_architecture Architecture x86_64 -> amd64, aarch64 -> arm64
os_version OSVersion '24.04' (already structured, no parsing)
os_name OperatingSystem 'Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS' minus the version
run_environment is kept rather than replaced: "which distro" and "is this
virtualised" are different questions, and WSL2 is a real performance factor.
String handling lives in app/utils/platform_metadata.ts with unit tests, matching
the amd_hsa_override convention, so it is testable without a Docker daemon.
Unknown architectures pass through verbatim rather than being guessed at, and
os_name falls back to the full description whenever the version is missing or
absent from it — an over-long name is harmless, a wrong one is not.
Columns are nullable and the submission fields optional, so results recorded
before this shipped remain submittable.
Closes#1156
Refs #1151
0891d176e5