A Detailed Guide To Phoronix Test Suite 2.0

In less than two weeks we will be officially releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" and this by far is the biggest upgrade ever to our flagship testing and benchmarking software. While the Phoronix Test Suite is most often associated with Linux, this open-source software is also compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD operating systems too, all of which offer new improvements with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. In this article we have detailed some of the major highlights of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and how we seek to drive innovation into PC benchmarking and performance profiling.

Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 was released last June and was based upon the internal work that had built up for the past five years at Phoronix Media and with the involvement of several tier-one hardware vendors. Since the release of 1.0 Trondheim we have delivered quarterly updates to continue enhancing this software as well as to deliver new and updated test profiles. Many major companies have also started using the Phoronix Test Suite for various quality assurance and testing tasks within their organizations. The Phoronix Test Suite has come a long way, but with the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 we hope to take it to the next level. Version 2.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite offers more than 100 distinct test profiles, over 60 run-time options, and an entire architecture for which independent users and organizations are able to build their own test profiles and suites to customize this software to their needs.

The total number of tests shipping with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 will be 109. Some of the test profiles just introduced in 2.0 Sandtorg includes apache, cachebench, opstone-svd, opstone-svsp, opstone-vsp, crafty, tiobench, pgbench, gmpbench, dbench, minion, nero2d, sudokut, dcraw, n-queens, blogbench, postmark, video-cpu-usage, and supertuxkart. These new test profiles range from an Apache benchmark to computational solvers to multi-threaded disk benchmarks. Run phoronix-test-suite list-tests or look at the relevant tab in the GTK2 GUI for more information on each of the available test profiles. Beyond new tests, several existing test profiles were also upgraded. In fact, a majority of the test profiles were upgraded for one reason or another, whether it to re-base the test against a newer version of the upstream software or to take advantage of new testing features in pts-core (the heart of the Phoronix Test Suite). As part of that, more of the test profiles are now tested and compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD operating systems. More mirrors have also been added for some of the test profiles to provide faster downloads.

Beyond just the test profiles, several new suites can also be found in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. There are 47 test suites to be found in this new version, with the suites ranging from tests of various sub-systems to a collection of other tests. Some of the new suites that are delivered in 2.0 Sandtorg include server, opstone, openmp, kernel, server-motherboard, workstation-graphics, cpu, and desktop-graphics.