We recently became aware of two potential issues with running MobileXPRT 2013 on versions of Android 4.4 (KitKat) and a pre-release version of Android L. The first involves a reported failure of MobileXPRT 2013 to display scores when running on a Nexus 5 running KitKat with the ART runtime enabled. ART is an experimental Android Runtime available on a number of mobile devices, and offers several features not found in Android’s current default runtime, Dalvik. We have not been able to reproduce this specific problem, and have successfully tested MobileXPRT on a Nexus 5 running Android 4.4.3 with ART enabled. If you encounter this problem, contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.
The second issue is specific to the pre-release version of Android L. On that OS, we have seen a failure of the MobileXPRT Create Slideshow workload. We found that while previous versions of Android used specific addresses when loading libraries, this pre-release version of Android L loads libraries at different addresses as a security precaution. This appeared to be causing the workload failure. Recompiling with the –pie flag, so as to be position independent, seems to fix the problem.
As soon as thorough testing is complete, we’ll be releasing a patched build on MobileXPRT.com, and expect no problems running MobileXPRT on Android L.
If you have any questions about MobileXPRT or any of the other benchmarks, feel free to send us a message.
Justin
