Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Enters Beta

After a three month development period following the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, the first beta release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 "Bardu" is now available for all of your testing needs on Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD platforms. Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Beta 1 carries more than 200 changes since the release of 2.0 Sandtorg with many new prominent features being introduced, new test profiles added, and greater usability enhancements. In this article, we will go over some of the key improvements to be found in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 had shipped with more than 100 test profiles, but with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 we have upped that to 120 test profiles that are included by default with our open-source testing software! This is in addition to 50 different test suites. Among the new test profiles that have been added to Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 thus far include Stream, Tachyon, PyBench, TSCP, John The Ripper, GeekBench, NASA NAS Parallel Benchmarks, AIO Stress, ATI OpenCL, PyOpenCL, and HPC Challenge. OpenCL benchmarking is one of the areas that is being worked on with Bardu and future releases. Many test profiles have also been updated to support new operating systems (particularly more tests being compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard), updated against their latest upstream versions, and various issues addressed. A few of the test profile updates include compress-7zip now being based off p7zip 9.04, the sqlite profile being upgraded against SQLite 3.6.19, the wine-unstable test profile being upped to Wine 1.1.32, GraphicsMagick 1.3.7 integration for the OpenMP graphics-magick test, the warsow test profile running with Warsow 0.5, the nexuiz test profile being upgraded against Nexuiz 2.5.2, and the video-cpu-usage test profile now supporting CoreVideo testing when run under Apple Mac OS X.

When it comes to the heart of the Phoronix Test Suite, pts-core, is where a bulk of the enhancements resides with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2. The new features that we have already mentioned here at Phoronix include the autonomous Git performance bisecting module, test recovery support for being able to recover and continue a test run after a system had locked up or crashed, support for multiple display modes, and anonymous usage reporting. Another big feature we have introduced is for ensuring statistical significance in test results by having pts-core compute the standard deviation between test runs and to automatically increase the test count if a certain (user-editable) threshold is exceeded or if an external test script determines the results statistically insignificant. Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 also supports network communication now through proxies when setup via the phoronix-test-suite network-setup command.