Phoronix Test Suite 1.8.0 "Selbu" Beta 2

The second beta release for Phoronix Test Suite 1.8.0 "Selbu" is now ready for testing. In the past nine days a fair amount of work has been committed for the 1.8 release. The most prominent feature is the reference systems comparisons support. This initial implementation makes it possible to easily compare your system's performance results to other reference systems.

Of course, quite easily you can already compare your results to others via Phoronix Global, but the reference systems will be broken down into just a few categories -- likely Low, Medium, and High end systems. This feature provides a quick assessment at how your Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, or Mac OS X system is performing compared against standard systems. More details on this feature can be found in this forum thread. Below is also a video that demonstrates this feature from the GTK2 interface.

Other features in this second beta include a new hardware sensor infrastructure, download caches on removable media devices are now supported on Mac OS X, there are various GTK2 improvements, and lastly there is a variety of small bug-fixes and enhancements.

Outside of pts-core, several test profiles have been added and many others have been updated against their latest upstream versions. POV-Ray, C-Ray, and Bwfirt are the new test profiles in this release, which all happen to be multi-threaded ray-tracing benchmarks. Among the updated test profiles are build-mysql, build-apache, build-imagemagick, compress-7zip, openssl, and sqlite. With the three new test profiles, there are now 90 test profiles in Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 (and 38 test suites). For some other statistics, the phoronix-test-suite package is made up of about 39,600 lines of code -- about 20,100 lines of that is the pts-core engine.

Those interested in testing out Phoronix Test Suite 1.8.0 Beta 2 can download this latest version via Phorogit or at the download page.

The final release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.8.0 "Selbu" can be expected by mid-April. Depending upon feedback and what ends up getting merged in the next week or two, there may be a third and final beta in early April. Share your thoughts on this latest update to our premiere testing software on the Phoronix Forums or the Phoronix Test Suite mailing list.