Phoronix Test Suite 0.2.1 Released

Earlier this week Phoronix Test Suite 0.2.0 was released, and in the speedy development cycle towards the first stable release of PTS, version 0.2.1 has been pushed out this morning. Phoronix Test Suite 0.2.1 includes a few new profiles, support for using the distribution's package management system for some tasks, and a few fixes since the 0.2.0 release.

The new testing profiles in the Phoronix Test Suite are for FRAC, GLMark, and GtkPerf. While GLMark and FRAC will run with the Phoronix Test Suite, the benchmark results are not yet being properly reported. Also, GLMark is a new open-source benchmark and it currently lacks some needed features. GtkPerf, however, should be fully working with this release.

The new support for using the distribution's package management system is used when a testing profile specifies the need for "External Dependencies" in order to run. This support is still very initial and currently Ubuntu is the only Linux distribution with this support. To install any distribution packages for a test, run phoronix-test-suite install-dependencies SUITE-OR-TEST. External dependencies are only used when there is a long chain of packages needed for a benchmark. For example, the OpenGL Utility Toolkit and GTK development files are part of the PTS External Dependencies in some benchmarks.

We're in need of interested developers in writing the XML package information and package installation install scripts for their distribution(s). Check out pts/misc-files/distro-scripts/install-ubuntu-packages.sh and pts/misc-files/distro-xml/ubuntu-packages.xml for a template.

Better integration with the "External Dependencies" feature and further improvements will be done in a forthcoming release.

This release also contains a few bug fixes. One minor addition to Phoronix Test Suite 0.2.1 is that displayed on each graph is now the proportion for the results whether a greater or lower result means better performance.

Check out the git tree or download PTS 0.2.1. Be sure to submit your Linux benchmark results to PTS Global.

The next development release of the Phoronix Test Suite should be out in a week or less. We continue to feel that the first stable release of the Phoronix Test Suite should be ready by early May.