Phoronix Test Suite

Last updated
Phoronix Test Suite
Developer(s) Michael Larabel, Matthew Tippett
Initial releaseApril 2008
Stable release
10.8.4 [1] / July 3, 2022;17 months ago (2022-07-03)
Repository Phoronix-test-suite on GitHub
Written in PHP
Operating system Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, Windows
Size 703 kB (base program)
Available in English
Type Benchmark
License GNU General Public License v3
Website phoronix-test-suite.com

Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) is a free and open-source benchmark software for Linux and other operating systems. The Phoronix Test Suite, developed by Michael Larabel and Matthew Tippett, has been endorsed by sites such as Linux.com, [2] LinuxPlanet, [3] and Softpedia. [4]

Contents

Features

Phoronix Test Suite supports over 220 test profiles and over 60 test suites. It uses an XML-based testing architecture. Tests available to use include MEncoder, FFmpeg and lm sensors, along with OpenGL games such as Doom 3 , Nexuiz , and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars , and many more. [5] The suite also contains a feature called PTS Global where users may upload their test results and system information for sharing. By executing a single command, other users can compare their test results to a selected system in an easy-comparison mode. [6] Before 2014, these benchmark results could be uploaded to the Phoronix Global online database, but since 2013, these benchmark results can be uploaded to openbenchmarking.org. [7] Phoronix supports automated Git bisecting on a performance basis to find performance regressions and features statistical significance verification.

Components

Phoromatic

Phoromatic is a web-based remote test management system for the Phoronix Test Suite. It allows the automatic scheduling of tests. It's aimed at the enterprise. It can manage multiple test nodes simultaneously within a test farm or distributed environment.

Phoromatic Tracker

Phoromatic Tracker is an extension of Phoromatic that provides a public interface into test farms. [8] Currently, their reference implementations autonomously monitor the performance of the Linux kernel on a daily basis, [9] Fedora Rawhide, [10] and Ubuntu. [11]

PTS Desktop Live

PTS Desktop Live was a stripped-down x86-64 Linux distribution, which included Phoronix Test Suite 2.4. It was designed for testing/benchmarking computers from a LiveDVD / LiveUSB environment. [12]

Phodevi

Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface) is a library that provides a clean, stable, platform-independent API for accessing software and hardware information. [13]

PCQS

Phoronix Certification & Qualification Suite (PCQS) is a reference specification for the Phoronix Test Suite.

Phoronix website

Phoronix
Phoronix-logo.png
Phoronix-Screenshot.png
Phoronix logo and screenshot
Type of site
Review
Available inEnglish
Created byMichael Larabel
URL phoronix.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationRequired (for the forums)
LaunchedJune 5, 2004;19 years ago (2004-06-05)
Current statusActive

Phoronix is a technology website that offers information on the development of the Linux kernel, product reviews, interviews, and news regarding free and open-source software by monitoring the Linux kernel mailing list or interviews.

Phoronix was started in June 2004 by Michael Larabel, who currently serves as the owner and editor-in-chief.

History

Founded on June 5, 2004, [14] Phoronix started as a website with a handful of hardware reviews and guides, [15] [16] moving to articles covering operating systems based on Linux and open-source software such as Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, [17] and Mozilla (Firefox/Thunderbird) around the start of 2005. [18] Phoronix focuses on benchmarking hardware running Linux, with a slant toward graphics articles that monitor and compare free and open-source graphics device drivers and Mesa 3D with AMD's and Nvidia's proprietary graphics device drivers. In June 2006, the website added forums to accompany news content. [19] On April 20, 2007, Phoronix redesigned its website and began publishing Solaris hardware reviews and news in addition to Linux content. [20] [21]

Other technical publications, such as CNET News, have cited Phoronix benchmarks. [22] [23]

Open Benchmarking

OpenBenchmarking.org is a web-based service created to work with the Phoronix Test Suite. It is a collaborative platform that allows users to share their hardware and software benchmarks through an organized online interface. [24]

It is primarily used for performance benchmarking and testing hardware/software performance, typically in the context of Linux-based systems (unlike SoapUI, which is used for testing web services). [25]

Release history

On June 5, 2008, Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 was released under the codename Trondheim. [26] This 1.0 release was made up of 57 test profiles and 23 test suites. [27]

On September 3, 2008, Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 was released with support for the OpenSolaris operating system, [28] a module framework accompanied by tests focusing upon new areas, [29] and new test profiles.

Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 includes a graphical user interface (GUI) using GTK+ written using the PHP-GTK bindings.

3.4 includes MATISK benchmarking module and initial support for the GNU Hurd.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux distribution</span> Operating system based on the Linux kernel

A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windowing system</span> Software that manages separately different parts of display screens

In computing, a windowing system is a software suite that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP paradigm for a user interface.

JACK Audio Connection Kit is a professional sound server API and pair of daemon implementations to provide real-time, low-latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications. JACK was developed by a community of open-source developers led by Paul Davis and has been a key piece of infrastructure and the de facto standard for professional audio software on Linux since its inception in 2002. The server is free software, licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, while the library is licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later.

X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.

Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free and open-source graphics device driver</span> Software that controls computer-graphics hardware

A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.

The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) is a series of integrated graphics processors introduced in 2004 by Intel, replacing the earlier Intel Extreme Graphics series and being succeeded by the Intel HD and Iris Graphics series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PulseAudio</span> Sound server for Unix-like operating systems

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

A desktop environment is a collection of software designed to give functionality and a certain look and feel to an operating system.

nouveau (software) Open source software driver for Nvidia GPU

nouveau is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.

X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA), designed by AMD Graphics for its Radeon GPU and APU, is an arbitrary extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System on Linux operating-systems. XvBA API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are currently motion compensation (MC) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), and variable-length decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), WMV3, and VC-1 encoded video.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mode setting</span>

Mode setting is a software operation that activates a display mode for a computer's display controller by using VESA BIOS Extensions or UEFI Graphics extensions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wayland (protocol)</span> Display system intended to replace X11

Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.

Nvidia Optimus is a computer GPU switching technology created by Nvidia which, depending on the resource load generated by client software applications, will seamlessly switch between two graphics adapters within a computer system in order to provide either maximum performance or minimum power draw from the system's graphics rendering hardware.

systemd-boot UEFI boot manager

systemd-boot is a free and open-source boot manager created by obsoleting the gummiboot project and merging it into systemd in May 2015.

Besides the Linux distributions designed for general-purpose use on desktops and servers, distributions may be specialized for different purposes including computer architecture support, embedded systems, stability, security, localization to a specific region or language, targeting of specific user groups, support for real-time applications, or commitment to a given desktop environment. Furthermore, some distributions deliberately include only free software. As of 2015, over four hundred Linux distributions are actively developed, with about a dozen distributions being most popular for general-purpose use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ubuntu MATE</span> Derivative of the Ubuntu operating system

Ubuntu MATE is a free and open-source Linux distribution and an official derivative of Ubuntu. Its main differentiation from Ubuntu is that it uses the MATE desktop environment as its default user interface, instead of the GNOME 3 desktop environment that is the default user interface for Ubuntu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Subsystem for Linux</span> Compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows developers to run a Linux environment without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting. There are two versions of WSL: WSL 1 and WSL 2. WSL 1 was first released on August 2, 2016, and acts as a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables by implementing Linux system calls on the Windows kernel. It is available on Windows 10, Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022.

Zstandard, commonly known by the name of its reference implementation zstd, is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Zstd is the reference implementation in C. Version 1 of this implementation was released as open-source software on 31 August 2016.

References

  1. "Release History", Phoronix Test Suite , retrieved July 24, 2022
  2. "Phoronix Test Suite brings Linux benchmarking to the desktop". Linux.com.
  3. "Benchmarking Linux With the Phoronix Test Suite — Worth Taking a Look", LinuxPlanet (reports)
  4. "The Best Benchmarking Platform: Phoronix Test Suite – Linux-based testing platform for software and hardware validation!". Softpedia. 6 June 2008.
  5. "OpenBenchmarking.org - Cross-Platform, Open-Source Automated Benchmarking Platform" . Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  6. "Phoronix Test Suite" . Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  7. "Phoronix Global Is Still Planned To Be Decommissioned". www.phoronix.com. Retrieved 2023-10-10.
  8. Phoromatic Tracker Launches To Monitor Linux Performance, Phoronix
  9. "Kernel Performance Tracker", Phoromatic [ permanent dead link ]
  10. "Fedora Rawhide Performance Tracker", Phoromatic, archived from the original on 2012-07-11
  11. "Ubuntu Performance Tracker", Phoromatic, archived from the original on 2010-04-15, retrieved 2010-05-04
  12. Announcing PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 "Gernlinden", Phoronix
  13. "A Detailed Guide To Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 (Sandtorg)". www.phoronix.com. Retrieved 2023-10-10.
  14. "Happy 5th Birthday, Phoronix!". Phoronix. 5 June 2009. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
  15. "Intel Celeron D". Phoronix. 13 November 2004. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
  16. "Camo Painting Case Guide". Phoronix. 13 July 2004. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
  17. "Operating Systems Archives". Phoronix. 25 March 2005. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
  18. "Software Archives". Phoronix. 21 February 2005. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
  19. "Forums Launch". Phoronix. 15 June 2006. Retrieved 2010-03-05.
  20. "Welcome To The New Phoronix". Phoronix. 20 April 2007. Retrieved 5 March 2010.
  21. "Phoronix To Support Solaris OS". Phoronix. 20 April 2007. Retrieved 5 March 2010.
  22. Shankland, Stephen. "New Linux look fuels old debate". News.com. Retrieved 5 March 2010.
  23. Shankland, Stephen. "Intel aims for open-source graphics advantage". News.com. Retrieved 5 March 2010.
  24. "Features". OpenBenchmarking.org. Retrieved 2019-08-06.
  25. "SoapUI Tutorial | PFLB". pflb.us. 2020-11-09. Retrieved 2023-08-09.
  26. "Demystifying Codenames: Trondheim", Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix
  27. News (press release), Yahoo![ dead link ]
  28. "Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 To Support OpenSolaris", trondheim-pts (mailing list), Jul 2008, archived from the original on 2011-07-15, retrieved 2008-07-14
  29. "Phoronix Test Suite brings Linux benchmarking to the desktop", Linux.com