Phoronix Test Suite Released

Road-Map

The current plan is to have a polished v1.0 release (codenamed Trondheim) of the Phoronix Test Suite in June or July of this year. Among the features we plan to have implemented by that time include a full-featured GUI, verbose system logging capabilities, performance optimization tips based upon your hardware/software configuration, warnings if you have features like Intel SpeedStep or other technologies that may adversely impact your performance results, improved merging/comparisons of results, a greater focus on qualitative benchmarks, improved hardware and software detection, possible support for Solaris Express, and much more polishing. We hope to have around three dozen test profiles (or more) in a verified working state in time for the 1.0 release. As Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 nears, this suite will be used for all of the Linux hardware and software benchmarking used in Phoronix.com articles. Until things have stabilized, however, we will continue to be using our own internal custom scripts for these production tests. In the near term, v0.2 and v0.3 of the Phoronix Test Suite should both be out within the next month containing additional features. We'll also be looking to produce a Phoronix Test Suite LiveDVD containing some of the free software tests.

The latest development code for the Phoronix Test Suite can be found in its Phorogit repository and check out Phoronix-Test-Suite.com for all of the latest information. There is currently no mailing list setup, but by subscribing to this RSS feed you can be alerted to the latest discussions and announcements.

We don't want these GPLv3 code contributions to be a one-way streak, and are looking for project maintainers or interested community members who want to create these testing profiles for their favorite software packages. We're also more than willing to accept pts-core patches and other feature requests, etc. Any inquiries can be made to the Phoronix Test Suite Forum or by contacting phoronix [at] phoronix.com (note: all technical support will only be answered in the forums). It's not hard at all to write these PTS profiles and one can generally be written in under 30 minutes. In the near future, we'll be writing the documentation that covers creating custom profiles and suites.

We'll also be making many improvements to the Phoronix Test Suite Global Database. Among the improvements are allowing direct comparisons between two uploaded sets of benchmarks using the web front-end, searching to view results based upon select hardware/software component(s), registered user uploads, filtering, and much more. The infrastructure for these new features is already in place and we will be rolling them out shortly. Combined with PTS Global, the Phoronix Test Suite can offer some terrific collaborative testing capabilities.

Beyond version 1.0, we will continue to provide regular updates to reflect the latest trends in the computing industry and continuing to add support for new suites and test profiles (as well as features). We believe that the Phoronix Test Suite will be a valuable tool for not only us in our day-to-day Linux benchmarking, but for end-users looking for a more reliable way to benchmark their systems, pushing ISVs to make their software more testable, pushing Linux projects for more performance optimizations, and last but not least is to push more hardware vendors to conduct Linux testing.

Over the past four years the Linux ecosystem has changed for a large part it's rare to find Linux incompatible hardware, but it's becoming a matter of having vendors optimize their drivers and ensuring a quality experience across a wide array of applications on this free software platform. In the development of the Phoronix Test Suite we have spoken with hardware vendors who are willing to have their quality assurance teams use Linux to a greater extent, if there was a platform in place for doing this work in an autonomous, reproducible, and standardized way. The Phoronix Test Suite will be able to fill this void.

Download links and PTS Global are accessible through Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

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