A majority of the Phoronix Test Suite development and testing is done on Ubuntu and Fedora Linux, but this software should run virtually unmodified on any Linux distribution. The only distribution-specific bits deal with the external dependencies support feature. For instance, if you are not running one of the supported distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Gentoo, OpenSolaris, OpenSuSE, and CentOS) you may need to install a package manually in order for a test to run. For example, GCC and the OpenGL Utility Toolkit may need to be installed manually by the user to support the OpenGL source tests.
The Phoronix Test Suite can be simply extracted from the downloaded .tar.gz file or it can also be installed system-wide. If you just wish to run the Phoronix Test Suite without installing it, open a terminal and run ./phoronix-test-suite <options> from the same directory.
The only required dependencies for the Phoronix Test Suite on Linux systems is PHP 5.x CLI (packages for it are commonly called php5-cli or php-cli or just php). Additionally, the PHP GD module (commonly called php-gd or php5-gd) is also needed to render graphs to PNG image files instead of using the experimental SVG renderer. It's important to note that only PHP 5 is needed and not a web server (Apache) or other packages commonly associated with PHP. The reasoning behind the use of PHP 5 for is the portability across platforms for this language, low impact on the overall system, a lower entrance barrier for new developers, and low number (if any) dependencies that PHP5 CLI requires. The PHP GD library is used for rendering the graphs within the PTS Results Viewer.
Note #1: Depending upon your distribution's package configuration, you may also need php-posix package for providing the POSIX functions.
Note #2: You may need to modify the php.ini file on your system in order to support uploading results to Phoronix Global or logging into your Phoronix Global account. The allow_url_fopen, file_uploads, and allow_url_include options must be set to true in the PHP configuration and curl must be supported by the PHP installation. Additional information.
While PHP is the only required dependency, many of the test profiles do require the standard Linux development tools/libraries (GCC, etc). On a clean Ubuntu installation, it's as easy as first running sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-gd and then running the Phoronix Test Suite as it will take care of installing additional dependencies.
The Phoronix Test Suite has a feature known as "External Dependencies" where the Phoronix Test Suite can attempt to automatically install some of the test-specific dependencies on supported distributions. If running on a distribution where there is currently no External Dependencies profile, the needed package(s) are listed. To see all possible External Dependencies, run phoronix-test-suite list-possible-dependencies.
If manually changing the location of the phoronix-test-suite file, the environmental PTS_USER_DIR variable must be adjusted inside the file to reflect the absolute location that leads to the root directory of the pts and pts-core folders. The pts folder houses the XML test profiles, XML test suites, test resource files, the External Dependencies files, and other important information. The pts-core directory is the "engine" of the Phoronix Test Suite.
Running install-sh from the root directory of the Phoronix Test Suite will install the software for system-wide access. By default the phoronix-test-suite executable is in /usr/bin/, the Phoronix Test Suite files in /usr/share/phoronix-test-suite/, and the documentation in /usr/share/doc/phoronix-test-suite/. Root access is required. The default installation prefix is /usr/ but can be adjusted as the first argument (example: install-sh /home/user/ to install the Phoronix Test Suite in your home directory).
Debian/Ubuntu users are able to follow the Generic Installation instructions or optionally can generate their own Debian package. If dpkg-dev is installed, run php pts-core/scripts/build-package-deb.php and a Debian package will be generated which can be subsequently installed. This package contains the phoronix-test-suite executable in /usr/bin/, the Phoronix Test Suite files in /usr/share/phoronix-test-suite/, and the documentation in /usr/share/doc/phoronix-test-suite/.
Phoronix Media maintains a Debian package repository for the Phoronix Test Suite of all the latest releases. To use this repository, add the following line deb http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo pts.debian/ to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list file.
Gentoo ebuild's for the Phoronix Test Suite have been created by users and can be currently found in the Gentoo BugZilla.
Phoronix Test Suite packages are available through Mandriva Cooker starting with the Mandriva Linux 2009 release. These packages were made by Stephane Teletchea.
The Phoronix Test Suite core (pts-core) is supported on Solaris and OpenSolaris platforms, but some features may not fully function. Additionally, the PTS External Dependencies feature is supported on OpenSolaris using IPS (the Image Packaging System). However, not all test profiles are supported on Solaris / OpenSolaris, and it may be in violation of your end-user agreement to perform such benchmarks on the Sun Solaris operating system. Using the OpenSolaris Image Packaging System, installing SUNWphp524 will provide PHP, PHP GD, and related dependencies.
The Phoronix Test Suite also supports *BSD operating systems. However, like the Solaris support, not all test profiles are compatible with BSD operating systems, but pts-core has been tested against FreeBSD 7.0 and OpenBSD 4.4.
The Phoronix Test Suite is fully supported on Apple's Mac OS X operating system. PHP ships with Mac OS X by default so it's as easy as just downloading the Phoronix Test Suite package, extracting it, and running the executable. For tests that rely upon a compiler, Apple's Xtools with GCC will need to be installed.
- If you are a company or simply own multiple computers, the download caching support of the Phoronix Test Suite can work quite well. This feature allows you to very simply setup a local (or network-wide) repository for the Phoronix Test Suite of all the files the different tests use. After you have installed the tests on one system that you normally use (or have ran phoronix-test-suite install-all) running phoronix-test-suite make-download-cache will cache all of the files that each test downloaded. The location of this cache is ~/.phoronix-test-suite/download-cache/.
Once the cache has been created, you can copy this folder to other systems and place the files in the same location. Then when the Phoronix Test Suite needs to download a file for a test, before downloading it from the Internet it will first check this cache for the file(s). If the files are there and the MD5 check-sums have been verified, it will simply copy the file -- thereby saving bandwidth and time. The download cache location can be downloaded in ~/.phoronix-test-suite/user-config.xml. By adjusting the download cache, you could setup the cache folder to be on an FTP or NFS share (as an example) on a server that's accessible via your LAN. Configure your test systems to use this local repository and you will be saving time and bandwidth.