Phoronix Test Suite 0.4.0 Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Phoronix Test Suite 0.4.0 Released

Following last week's release of Phoronix Test Suite 0.3.0 and the 0.3.1 hot-fix, a surprising amount of changes have wound up in this week's development release known as version 0.4.0. In fact, there are 21 major changes in this new release not counting general development work and minor bug fixes. Among the changes are new test profiles, a number of new PTS options, PTS External Dependencies support for new Linux distributions, reworking how results are saved, and the graphs are now rendered locally when saving the results.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12268

[Michael]

Test away... take note PHP GD is now required if you wish to see the graphs. Aside from that, hopefully no major regressions in this release...

[lordmozilla]

Wow progress is really fast on this, good to see, however do you really have to bump up the numbers so quickly? I mean are you trying to get to 1.0 as quickly as possible? By my accounts you should be on like 0.1.4 and not 0.4. Admittedly this is unimportant, but it seems silly to just jump so fast when there are not really all that many changes between some of the releases...

Ether way keep up the good work, just about to run a 0.4 universe benchmark...

Also how about a .deb package? and maybe .rpm, but it would be cool to have this product in the debian repo's! also it would help so people would be able to upgrade version easily... maybe your own apt repo?

[deanjo]

Originally Posted by lordmozilla

Also how about a .deb package? and maybe .rpm, but it would be cool to have this product in the debian repo's! also it would help so people would be able to upgrade version easily... maybe your own apt repo?

I have already suggested this in another thread. I suggested that Michael look into the openSuSE build service as it can build packages for:

• SUSE
  • openSUSE 10.3
  • openSUSE 10.2
  • SUSE Linux 10.1
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 10
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 9
  • openSUSE Factory
• Debian
  • Debian Etch
• Red Hat
  • Fedora 8
  • Fedora 7
  • Fedora 6 + Extras
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • CentOS 5
• Mandriva Linux
  • Mandriva 2008
  • Mandriva 2007
  • Mandriva 2006
• xUbuntu
  • xUbuntu 6.06
  • xUbuntu 7.04
  • xUbuntu 7.10
  xUbuntu 8.04

With more being added soon.

[puntarenas]

Originally Posted by Michael

Test away... take note PHP GD is now required if you wish to see the graphs. Aside from that, hopefully no major regressions in this release...

Very minor issue, but is there a way to have the graphs generated on a saved result (I had one universe run without PHP GD installed)?

PTS really improves very fast and I think you are working hard to stabilize the main features in the first place. However there are some suggestions I would love to see included some day:

Option: ignore-first-run

On some tests (e.g. audio-encoding) the first run really suffers from disk activity and counting it into average seems a bit odd to me.

3D settings detection

I don't know if it is possible to detect the driver settings of nvidia-glx or fglrx, but it would be nice to have AA and AF settings displayed in the results.


higher 4:3 resolutions

At least 1600x1200 would be nice, 1280x960 also seems to make sense.


additional run to measure the CPU limit of game tests

I would love to have an initial run of the game tests (maybe optional) with the lowest possible quality settings at 640x480 to determine the CPU limit of a game test. This should be displayed along with the final result (the "real" benchmark run).

[Michael]

Originally Posted by lordmozilla

I mean are you trying to get to 1.0 as quickly as possible?

Nope... 1.0 will have all of the features as planned aside from the GUI. 1.0 should be very stable and offer a great platform for writing Linux tests. The GUI will likely be postponed from the 1.0 release since it's not being requested much as it's already very easy to use from the CLI. The target has been to have 1.0 out in late May or early June and we're still on schedule for reaching that mark.[/quote]

Originally Posted by lordmozilla

Also how about a .deb package? and maybe .rpm, but it would be cool to have this product in the debian repo's! also it would help so people would be able to upgrade version easily... maybe your own apt repo?

There will be a .deb package of the Phoronix Test Suite in Ubuntu's Universe repository for 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, but a Debian package may be available from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com starting with v0.5 or v0.6. There will be packages available too in the next version of Mandriva and likely many other distributions to come.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by puntarenas

Very minor issue, but is there a way to have the graphs generated on a saved result (I had one universe run without PHP GD installed)?

There is no feature for that right now. Though one way to see it would be by just running phoronix-test-suite UPLOAD saved-result and then viewing it on PTS Global where you can see a graph generated there.

Originally Posted by puntarenas

PTS really improves very fast and I think you are working hard to stabilize the main features in the first place.

Yep, thanks.

Originally Posted by puntarenas

Option: ignore-first-run

On some tests (e.g. audio-encoding) the first run really suffers from disk activity and counting it into average seems a bit odd to me.

I've been meaning to add an option where a test maintainer can add this option in the XML profile for a test and it will ignore the first run. I'll try to get this done before the next release.

Originally Posted by puntarenas

I don't know if it is possible to detect the driver settings of nvidia-glx or fglrx, but it would be nice to have AA and AF settings displayed in the results.

With NVIDIA, yes, that information can be easily polled. On the fglrx driver, I don't know of a clean method.

Originally Posted by puntarenas

higher 4:3 resolutions

At least 1600x1200 would be nice, 1280x960 also seems to make sense.

Yep, another minor item that will be addressed shortly.

Originally Posted by puntarenas

additional run to measure the CPU limit of game tests

I would love to have an initial run of the game tests (maybe optional) with the lowest possible quality settings at 640x480 to determine the CPU limit of a game test. This should be displayed along with the final result (the "real" benchmark run).

Yep, coming soon.

[puntarenas]

You rule

[lordmozilla]

I have to say i'm very impressed with how quick you are dealing with all these issues. A gui is pointless though, don't bother with it yet ;-)

Thanks for replying to all of our questions so quickly!

[Michael]

Originally Posted by lordmozilla

I have to say i'm very impressed with how quick you are dealing with all these issues.

That's just the rate at which I take care of business.