Soon: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.6, Oh My!

Just yesterday we unleashed Phoromatic 1.0 with a horde of improvements to our remote test management system and as part of that introduced the Phoromatic Ubuntu Tracker, which benchmarks Ubuntu on a daily basis looking for performance regressions across multiple systems. Earlier today we then called out for benchmarking requests as what we should track next using our testing and execution framework (so far the likely contender is seeing how Wine's performance is evolving on a per-commit basis, but let us know what you think). Now to end out this week of announcements I have something else to share that's particularly interesting.

Last November I hinted that Windows support was coming to the Phoronix Test Suite and a month later I went on a sabbatical in Germany to focus on the Windows 7 support up-bringing to this GPLv3-licensed software. Since returning there's continued to be a monumental amount of work going into the Phoronix Test Suite that benefits not only the existing Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X support, but the forthcoming Microsoft Windows support too. With that said, it's looking like within two or three weeks the Windows support within the Phoronix Test Suite will be fully functioning and ready for official use.

The heart of the Phoronix Test Suite, pts-core, will be fully compatible with Windows 7 (and should work fine on older versions such as Windows Vista and XP) and there should be at least a dozen (or more) test profiles that will seamlessly (and natively) work across our Linux / BSD / OpenSolaris / Mac OS X / Windows test spectrum. This means automated, highly reproducible tests across practically every major operating system. The support will continue to be refined going forward especially as we get closer to hitting Phoronix Test Suite 3.0, but April and May should be very exciting months.

Not only will the Phoronix Test Suite run on Windows, but features like Phoronix Global and Phoromatic will work on the Microsoft OS too, since we know of no other publicly available software (let alone open-source software) that provides the depth and automated testing feature set that is available from this Phoronix software stack. Windows may not be our favorite OS, but that's no reason to deprive those users from experiencing a robust benchmarking framework and letting them be exposed to more open-source software -- as after all, most of the tests within the Phoronix Test Suite use free software components as benchmarks. Also benefiting from this work will be the Wine project as new Windows test profiles should also function under Wine with the Phoronix Test Suite thanks to Cascading Test Profiles, a feature we introduced to pts-core more than one year ago.

Following this code push, you can expect a variety of interesting articles to appear on Phoronix.com. We will certainly be delivering benchmarks that compare the performance of Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.6 and a plethora of other tests (including multi-platform graphics driver benchmarks) that can now be easily and reliably delivered across operating systems in a manner that's reproducible by anyone. We will also be using a variety of hardware in this testing.

This Windows support will be part of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 "Lyngen" release, but stay tuned for more announcements.