Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.1 Released

It's been two weeks since Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.0 was released and today is the first point release in the 1.0 branch. This update mostly incorporates a few bug fixes for some common issues and other minor improvements.

When it comes to tests and suites, there is now an encoding suite. The encoding suite is a meta test, which in turn runs both the video-encoding and audio-encoding suites. A new test in this release is stresscpu2. This test profile is designed to stress the processor when looking for stability problems, burning in the system, testing power supplies / heatsinks, and other uses. The superpi test profile has been updated in Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.1 to calculate Pi to lengths greater than one million digits.

The External Dependencies XML for Mandriva Linux has been updated in PTS 1.0.1. With the External Dependencies, Gentoo is the latest distribution with this support for installing some packages using the distribution's package management system.

For those interested in building an RPM of the Phoronix Test Suite, running pts-core/scripts/build-package-rpm.php will build an RPM on Red Hat / Fedora distributions. An environment variable has also been added to the Phoronix Test Suite for overriding the amount of video memory automatically detected by the system. By setting VIDEO_MEMORY prior to running the Phoronix Test Suite, the amount (in megabytes) will be used inside the Phoronix Test Suite instead of the vRAM capacity automatically detected.

When it comes to system monitoring support within the Phoronix Test Suite, there is now CPU frequency monitoring support. Using MONITOR=cpu.freq will monitor the CPU's frequency during the tests. There is also now basic GPU usage monitoring support when using the ATI fglrx (Catalyst) driver.

Some of the fixes include improving the CPU physical processor count detection, trivial code fixes, using xdg-open (when available) for opening the PTS Results Viewer / PTS Global in the proper web browser, fixing scimark2 in universe-cli, and updating pcqs-desktop-graphics and gui-toolkits test suites. A clone option has also been added to the Phoronix Test Suite for saving a local copy of a result from PTS Global.

Downloading the Phoronix Test Suite and more information on it can be found at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.