Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.0

As described by Carla Schroder in the press release, PTS Global is one of the especially interesting areas within the Phoronix Test Suite. We still deem PTS Global as being in beta and it will officially launch later this year with a plethora of new features, but for now, it's already worked out quite well. With development releases of the Phoronix Test Suite, interested users have already run some great tests. Independent users have done everything from underclocking and overclocking comparisons, comparing the Intel Q6600 to the Phenom 9850, looking at the impact of the AMD TLB Linux patch, and the compilation performance impact when using ccache. That's just four of the uploaded results to PTS Global, of the 1,000+ submissions reached even before version 1.0 was out.

The Phoronix Test Suite profiles are compatible across different Linux distributions, hardware configurations, and architectures. Much of the internal Trondheim testing has occurred on Ubuntu and Fedora (as well as Gentoo, PC Linux OS, SuSE), with the "External Dependencies" feature being the only distribution-specific portion of the Phoronix Test Suite for installing extra packages. Most of the bugs on these major distributions have been worked out, but there are still a few items we will be addressing in the minor updates being released over the coming weeks.

In addition to rolling out a number of new features in the next major update (Phoronix Test Suite 1.2), we will also be focusing greater work on PCQS, or the Phoronix Certification & Qualification Suites, that we are looking to define as a standard Linux test specification for different types of hardware. As time progresses, we're also looking at bringing the Phoronix Test Suite to OpenSolaris and an Apple developer is looking at Mac OS X support.

For those new to the Phoronix Test Suite, after you have downloaded (and installed, if you so desire) the software, one of the easiest commands to get you going is running:

phoronix-test-suite benchmark universe

This command will install and then proceed to run all tests within the universe suite, which is made up of nearly all 57 included tests. This may take several minutes to run, so if you are in a time crunch just try a test like openssl or gnupg. In addition, take note that the tests are by default (but can be configured within user-config.xml) installed to ~/.phoronix-test-suite/installed-tests/. In many cases, even if you have the software used by a test already installed on the system, the Phoronix Test Suite will continue with a second installation anyways. This is done in an attempt to standardize the environment in which the tests are running, as tests installed outside of the Phoronix Test Suite could contain extra patches, compile-time optimizations, or other modifications that may skew the results when performing a multi-system comparison.

For more information on the Phoronix Test Suite, check out its project webpage, PTS Forum, PTS Global, and the mailing list.

Aside from our major involvement with Phoronix Test Suite "Trondheim", we would also like to thank the other major contributors to the Phoronix Test Suite that at this time include Wuppermann, Andrew Schofield, Pekka Panula, Stefan Döesinger (CodeWeavers), Jörg Schirottke (Kanotix), Stéphane Teletchéa (Mandriva), Ben Supnik (Laminar Research), Peter Kraus, Nils Kneuper, Apaige, and others.