Phoronix Test Suite Brings Benchmarking To Mac OS X

In the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 "Malvik" release our flagship Linux benchmarking software was brought to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. With Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal", to be officially released later this year, we are now extending our test support to include Apple's Mac OS X operating system. In Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Alpha 2 that was released this morning there is full support for Mac OS X within this open-source benchmarking framework and there are about three dozen tests that will run "out of the box" in this environment. We believe this is now the most comprehensive benchmarking platform for Mac OS X and it allows real-world test results to be compared from Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.

Starting with Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Alpha 2 and newer releases, just head on over to Phoronix-Test-Suite.com to download the release that supports all of these operating systems. It's as easy as downloading the source package, extracting it, launching the terminal and changing to that directory, and then executing phoronix-test-suite. As Mac OS X ships with PHP 5 by default, there are no external dependencies that need to be acquired or any other steps taken. All of the options for the Phoronix Test Suite are the same on Mac OS X. However, due to the obvious differences between Linux and Mac OS X, not all of the tests within the Phoronix Test Suite can be run on Mac OS X. There are 77 test profiles shipping with Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Alpha 2 and of those there are 33 tests that we have verified to run properly on Mac OS X. Additional tests will be added in future releases.

To see which tests are compatible with your operating system, run phoronix-test-suite list-tests. We have also assembled a test suite of the main Mac OS X tests under the name Darwin. After the Phoronix Test Suite is setup, run phoronix-test-suite benchmark darwin. This will download all of the test files, install the tests, and then proceed to run each of them followed by reporting all of the results. Among the different benchmarks are SSL, file-encryption, audio encoding, video encoding, timed compilation, gaming, XML, ray-tracing, and many more. All of the Java tests are compatible with Mac OS X -- including the Java OpenGL benchmarks contributed by Sun Microsystems.