Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 Released With Revamped OpenBenchmarking.org For Open-Source, Automated Benchmarking

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 13 October 2020 at 01:16 PM EDT. Page 1 of 1. 9 Comments.

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now officially available as the latest major feature release for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software that now has more than six hundred tests/benchmarks available for fully-automated testing. With Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 also comes a significant overhaul to OpenBenchmarking.org and its biggest since its debut back in 2011 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

The most user-facing aspect of Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 is the revamped OpenBenchmarking.org that has been in alpha since August. The new OpenBenchmarking.org allows for easier GPU/CPU component comparisons including price analysis, new test profile analytics to help users evaluate different tests/options, a number of minor test discovery enhancements, a new analytics engine, and a lot of other "under the hood" work for scaling out ahead.

Try out OpenBenchmarking.org and share with us your feedback as more features and other refinements will be coming over the weeks/months ahead now that the new architecture is in place and designed with many forward-looking features in mind.

Also on the OpenBenchmarking.org side, during Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 development the milestone was crossed of having more than 600 different test profiles! Granted, thanks to OpenBenchmarking.org working like a package manager, nearly all of these new test profiles are available to existing Phoronix Test Suite clients without upgrading your PTS client, but there are a few new tests limited to Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 and newer for taking advantage of new capabilities. But in any case this summer has seen a lot of new and interesting test profiles (benchmarks) added so go explore the hundreds of different tests on OpenBenchmarking.org.

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 also ships with initial support for macOS 11.0 "Big Sur", PHP 8.0 support, various graphing improvements, and more.

Phodevi as the Phoronix Device Interface library that serves as a software/hardware abstraction layer also picked up support for next-generation Arm CPUs, detection of next-generation Intel CPUs and notable instruction set extensions like AMX, and other hardware/software detection improvements particularly for newer hardware and operating system releases.

One new module available to the Phoronix Test Suite is the "flush_caches" module that can be enabled with the PTS_FLUSH_CACHES environment variable for allowing all VM and swap caches to be cleared automatically prior to running each test.

Another new module is test_timeout that can be enabled with TEST_TIMEOUT_AFTER= whereby it can be set to "auto" or a number of minutes. The test_timeout module will automatically kill the test process if it exceeds the defined threshold. In the case of auto, it leverages OpenBenchmarking.org metadata and will kill any test that is taking three times longer than the average time to run said test. The intent is to automatically kill tests that have likely hung or hit other issues and not progressing. The TEST_TIMEOUT_AFTER=auto functionality will likely be enabled by default in a future release.

There are also a wide range of other smaller enhancements to the Phoronix Test Suite client and OpenBenchmarking.org for this 10.0 milestone. Download the open-source Phoronix Test Suite for Linux / BSD / Windows / macOS / Solaris systems via GitHub or Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

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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.