Phoronix Test Suite 0.8.0 Released

While not as large as last week's release, Phoronix Test Suite 0.8.0 has been released this morning with just over 30 items glazing its change-log. Much of the work done over the past week involved bug fixing, beginning to finalize several tests and suites, and other work in preparation around the forthcoming 1.0 release.

In Phoronix Test Suite 0.7.0 the support was added for a test profile to specify the download size and environmental size in regards to disk space that the test would consume. In Phoronix Test Suite 0.8.0 the support has now been added for the test maintainer to supply an estimated amount of time (in minutes) that it takes to properly complete the test. Test maintainers can accomplish this through the EstimatedLength XML tag. This time is then displayed to the end-user when viewing the test information.

The test-info and suite-info arguments have been merged into a generic info argument. When running phoronix-test-suite info followed by a test or suite name, the respective type's information will be displayed. Reported with the test information option are now also the required software dependencies. In addition, the test-info argument will show all suites using that specific test.

For those that have yet to write their own test profile, documentation surrounding the Phoronix Test Suite is starting to form with the 0.8.0 release. In the documentation folder is now a description of all XML tags used by test profiles, test suites, and test downloads. In addition, now a short guide covers systematically how to write a test profile for a simple program.

In Phoronix Test Suite 0.7.0, a pass-fail graph type was added for showing results of a pass-fail nature (such as whether the system was able to detect a functioning sound card). With this new release, a multi pass-fail graph type has been added, which allows multiple sub-tests to be contained within a single test. This is being used initially for one of the new profiles (compliance-ogl) for showing what OpenGL versions are supported on the target system. Below is an example.

New profiles in this release are pts-graph, compliance-ogl, gnupg, sqlite, build-apache, and specviewperf10. The pts-graph test is based around the Phoronix Test Suite grapher code, to time how long it takes to generate a large number of graphs using PHP 5 and the GD library. This test is mainly CPU intensive. The compliance-ogl test simply uses GLEW (the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library) to report which versions of OpenGL are reported by your system software and hardware. The gnupg test profile measures file encryption time using GnuPG. For measuring database performance within the Phoronix Test Suite, SQLite is now present and the time to perform several thousand insertions on a sample database will be measured.

Joining ImageMagick, the Linux Kernel, mplayer, and php as GCC build tests; Apache has been added to the Phoronix Test Suite. By running build-apache, it will time how long it takes to build Apache on the target system. Following this week's release of SPECViewPerf10, a profile for it has been constructed and is now in the test suite. When running SPECViewPerf 10 directly, you must manually select the number of cores in your system, etc. When running SPECViewPerf 10 through the Phoronix Test Suite, this is all done for you automatically. Further enhancements to the SPECViewPerf 10.0 profile will be coming soon. Due to differences between SPECViewPerf 9 and SPECViewPerf 10, the 9.0 profile will remain within the Phoronix Test Suite as specviewperf9.

The profiles fixed in this release and now should be fully working include Warsow, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Demo, and Quake 4. The Quake Wars profile is also updated against version 1.5. Many other profiles (nearly 50% or more) have been updated in Phoronix Test Suite 0.8.0 and the rest will have updates by version 0.9.0 of this Linux benchmarking platform.

Outside of the test profile changes, another highlight of this release is the improved results merging support. The Phoronix Test Suite will attempt to merge test results in a much more intelligent manner and can compensate for missing (or extra tests) in one saved file compared to another, etc. The easy way to describe the changes is to just try it out.

For those of you interested in installing all available Phoronix Test Suite tests in one easy run, an install-all option has been added along with a force-install-all option. These options will attempt to install all tests on the target system.

Some of the small items included tweaks to the suite-info formatting option, a regression fix in make-download-cache, fixing a divide by zero error, sensor monitoring tweaks, the Debian package generator that premiered with PTS 0.6.0 has received a few improvements with this release. On the side of PTS Global, the search page should now be active and working. Various other fixes and code cleaning can also be found in this release. When it comes to PTS sensor monitoring, the elapsed time that it took to run the test(s) is printed to the screen below the thermal/power statistics.

With much of pts-core now nearing completion for the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, a majority of the work is now focused upon working out any issues with the test profiles and finalizing the test suites. However, if you run into any bugs when using the Phoronix Test Suite, please be certain to let us know in the Phoronix Forums. We intend to release this first official release of the Phoronix Test Suite in June. From here on out will be mostly be test/suite work and minor alterations (with bug fixes) on the pts-core side. Head on over to Phoronix-Test-Suite.com to download this GPLv3-backed Linux testing software.