Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Enters Alpha
Last month the plans for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" were outlined with this next major release of our Linux (and Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD too) benchmarking software set to introduce many new features for the testing core, Phoromatic for providing remote benchmarking support, a performance and benchmarking oriented Linux distribution, and many other advancements. Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 will not be released until late July or early August, but the first alpha release has been made available this afternoon.
Introduced earlier this year in Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 was a GTK2 user-interface for those wanting an easy-to-use GUI rather than touching the command-line. In Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 this interface is continuing to be refined and is picking up more features to provide feature parity to the matching command-line options. In the Sandtorg Alpha 1 release, there is now support for selecting multiple tests/suites to run at once from the GTK notebook menu. There is also now the ability to log into a Phoronix Global account from the GTK2 interface, the main menus have been improved, and support is underway in providing a system tray icon with monitoring support for the Phoronix Test Suite.
An initial client module for Phoromatic has also been merged into the Alpha 1 release to provide support for our remote benchmarking system. From a web-based interface, a test administrator can manage schedules for tests and suites to be run simultaneously across multiple test nodes and manage clusters of test systems. More information on Phoromatic can be found at Phoromatic.com. A semi-private beta of the web-based portion to Phoromatic will begin later this month or early next month.
Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 1 also has many new test profiles and test suites. As was mentioned a few days ago, there are now 100 test profiles in the Phoronix Test Suite. Some of the new test profiles added to the Sandtorg branch include dbench (another disk test), gmpbench (a GMP test profile), pgbench (PostgreSQL testing), tiobench (Threaded I/O Tester), Crafty (an advanced chess engine), opstone-vsp (CPU Vector Scalar Product), opstone-svsp (CPU Sparse-Vector Scalar Product), opstone-svd (CPU Singular Value Decomposition), cachebench (a memory cache test), and apache (Apache benchmarking). Besides the new additions, several existing test profiles have been updated and many more of these test profiles are now compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and *BSD installations.
One of the underlying features to Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 is the migration to Phodevi: the Phoronix Device Interface. Up until now, all of the hardware/software detection code for being able to recognize installed computer components, monitor various system sensors, and interface with different software and hardware devices was developed within pts-core. With Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, all of these multi-platform software and hardware functions have been moved into a separate library known as Phodevi. This was done to provide a unified API for reading/setting software and hardware "properties" including a standardized interface for accessing system sensors.