A Huge Update To Phoronix Test Suite 2.0

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 June 2009 at 02:53 PM EDT. 3 Comments
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It has only been one week since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 2, but we happen to be ahead of schedule on the third (and possibly the final) alpha release for 2.0 Sandtorg. In the past eight days there has actually been a very large number of changes to the Phoronix Test Suite, both to pts-core and the included test profiles and suites.

We continue adding new options to the Phoronix Test Suite and among the ones added in this release are result-file-to-text, result-file-to-csv, estimate-run-time, validate-test-profile, and validate-test-suite. If you happen to be connected to a system via SSH running the Phoronix Test Suite or do not have a display server active on your system, the result-file-to-text option can be used to view the test results from the terminal rather than in the web-browser with our traditional XSL-based results viewer. The results-file-to-csv option will dump the test results in a Comma Separated Value (CSV) format in the event you wish to import the test results into a spreadsheet program or other utility. For those interested in looking at how much time is needed for a particular test or suite to run on a given system, the estimate-run-time option was added to show this information in a detailed manner. If you are looking at writing your own test profile or suite, the validate-test-profile and validate-test-suite are used for checking the XML syntax and scripts for any possible warnings or errors that the Phoronix Test Suite would generate.

Besides new options to the CLI version of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, the GTK2 interface continues to be refined and receives GUI versions of many of these new options. In Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 3, the GTK2 GUI now has a window for showing installed and missing test dependencies, a fix for those without GtkStatusIcon support, and a menu item has been added for selecting whether to show tests that have all of their needed files already downloaded locally or the tests that have files that are yet to be downloaded.

Some of the other changes in 2.0 Sandtorg Alpha 3 include general enhancements to pts-core, improved error handling during the testing process, and basic bash auto-completion support. Phodevi (described in this article) has received a file-system detection improvement, monitor detection support when using the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver on Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD, and support for the just-released OpenSolaris 2009.06 operating system.

When it comes to the test profiles in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 3 the JXRenderMark test profile has been updated, the espeak test profile has been updated against the latest upstream release, a postmark test profile has been added for NetApp's PostMark benchmark, blogbench has been added for the file-system / disk performance test that replicates the load encountered by a web-server hosting multiple blogs, the n-queens test profile has been introduced as a new computational OpenMP-based test, md-gromacs has been updated against their 4.0 series, and mafft has been upgraded against their 6.706 upstream release. Besides these prominent test changes, nearly every (of the 100+) test profiles have received underlying updates to take advantage of new features in the Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 pts-core code-base, such as with the install-exit-status and test-exit-status capabilities for error handling. Many test profiles have also had more download mirrors added in for a faster test installation. Other test profiles have also been optimized to use less disk space in order to conserve space for those that will be running within PTS Linux Live. New test suites have been added for kernel and OpenMP testing too.

As you can see, there are quite a few changes in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" Alpha 3, especially with Alpha 2 coming out just a week ago. In fact, the diff between the Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 releases are 6,423 lines of code! Normally we only do three alpha releases per development cycle before moving into the beta releases, but with Alpha 3 coming early we may push out a fourth alpha release in the next week or two depending upon what ends up getting committed to our Git repository in the coming days. Regardless, Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Beta 1 is planned for release later this month. The final release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 is planned for release in late July or August along with the releases of PTS Linux Live and Phoromatic.

The latest release of the Phoronix Test Suite can be downloaded at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. While most of the work for this open-source benchmarking software is done on Linux, the Phoronix Test Suite is also compatible with Mac OS X, BSD, and OpenSolaris operating systems.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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