Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 Released With Official Docker Benchmarking Image, New Testing Improvements

Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0-Rakkestad is officially shipping today as the latest quarterly feature release to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software. In addition to the Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 itself, there is the first official release of the newly-introduced "phoronix/pts" Docker image on Docker Hub for easily carrying out the benchmarks with the pre-seeded image.

Last month I went over the basics of this new phoronix/pts Docker image for those interested. This Docker image is built atop Clear Linux for an optimized and very performant Linux stack, ships with the Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 release and starts up directly to its text-based shell, and has a number of the most popular tests/suites pre-seeded on the image already to avoid having additional time spent downloading individual test files. The full capabilities of the Phoronix Test Suite can be enjoyed from this easy to deploy Docker image.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.2.0 also introduces Readline-based auto-completion support for CLI inputs on supported platforms and a module to carry out compiler Profile Guided Optimization testing. The PGO module makes it easy to run any test profile where it will automatically do a reference run, re-build the tests with the relevant GCC/Clang profile guided optimization flags, run the benchmarks once without collecting the performance results in order to generate the performance data, and then re-build the tests while making use of the PGO performance data for comparison purposes.

The Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 release also has a number of ARM hardware detection improvements, various Microsoft Windows support updates, CPU power reporting support via Intel RAPL, L1TF / Foreshadow mitigation reporting, a DropNoisyResults user configuration option to not save the test data from runs having high variance, a phoronix-test-suite list-cached-tests option to see all test profiles where there are locally cached files available (mainly if you are running without Internet access; there's been several offline testing improvements this cycle), a phoronix-test-suite list-all-tests option that is more verbose than list-tests to also include deprecated tests and other unsupported tests, and various other enhancements.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.2 is officially supported on Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows Server 2016+ / Windows 10 operating systems. This open-source automated benchmarking software with more than one thousand tests/suites available is available to download from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. The source, issue reporting, and other services are also available via Phoronix-Test-Suite on GitHub. Contact us for any commercial support needs and custom engineering services.