Phoronix announces release date for open source benchmark tools

Online media company Phoronix Media has announced the availability of version 2.0 of its Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and the pre-release of PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (code named "Gernlinden"). According to Phoronix founder Michael Larabel, Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (beta) will both be available on the 4th of August.

PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 is a comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform designed to run off a LiveDVD or LiveUSB device, aimed at hardware manufacturers and users and designed to test the performance of modern systems under Linux, without the need to install a full Linux distribution and benchmark suite. PTS Desktop Live is based on a development release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, the final version of which is expected to be available in October of this year, which has been stripped down from almost 700 MB to under 400 MB by removing excess packages and drivers. The distribution includes tests based on 7-Zip compression, IOzone, Apache web serving, Bwfirt, C-Ray, POV-Ray, Crafty, FFmpeg, MPlayer, Ogg encoding, LAME MP3 encoding, OpenSSL, PostMark, OpenMP, GraphicsMagick, SQLite and several others. PTS Desktop Live will include over 50 test profiles and all of the required dependencies. The current size of the distribution is just over 1 GB and, according to Larabel, this should be close to the final size when it's officially published on the 4th of August.

As the live distribution is designed to test new hardware, Phoronix has included the latest development snapshot of the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.27 and "other bleeding edge packages". Hardware drivers and other software packages that support computer hardware that's more than 3 years old have been stripped out. The hardware requirements for the release are a 64-bit processor, at least 2 GB of RAM and a modern video card that supports an open source graphics stack. As PTS Desktop Live won't run on a variety of older systems, Phoronix advises those users to keep running the older Phoronix Test Suite on their distribution of choice.

The next release of the live distribution, PTS Desktop Live 2009.4, will include additional performance optimisations and should be available before the end of the year. Other releases are expected follow in 2010. The upcoming releases will reportedly be more extensive and include additional tests, making the size of the distribution likely to grow to approximately 1.5 GB in size.

The ability to install PTS Desktop Live to a hard drive is not planned, nor is it supported by Phoronix. The inaugural release of PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 is only intended to run as a LiveCD or LiveUSB and is considered to be a beta or technology preview release.

(crve)