Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Enters Beta

Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 also has received a multitude of improvements to its GTK2 user-interface. The Phoronix Test Suite GUI, which was introduced in Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 as a technology preview, has been significantly overhauled in Bardu. In particular, many areas of the user-interface have been redesigned to offer better responsiveness during CPU-intensive tasks and to selectively build some caches for the user-interface commands when launching the Phoronix Test Suite. Work has also begun on providing a Phoronix Test Suite user-interface during the actual testing/benchmarking process, where previously it relied upon desktop notification events, the terminal output, or nothing at all. The run-time GUI shows the completion percentages for the current test, overall status, estimated time remaining, and other information. More features will be coming to this area in Phoronix Test Suite 2.4. The GTK2 GUI has also picked up various fixes and other smaller enhancements.

Some of the other improvements in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 include updates to the PTS module architecture, improved estimated run-time reporting when carrying out tests, experimental support for weighted test suites and results, cache share support for test profiles, a "Test All Options" menu item when selecting any test option(s) from a profile, and Phodevi has received a good number of updates too. Phodevi, which is the Phoronix Device Interface that provides an abstracted, stable API for reading hardware and software information (model numbers, system sensors, etc) across Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X operating systems continues to be refined since its introduction in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. Phodevi in PTS Bardu officially supports FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", and better support for some newer Linux distributions too. Sun SPARC customers should also notice better hardware detection improvements when running Solaris. Phodevi has also picked up support for setting some system properties, like graphics settings, via the addition of a new framework in a platform-independent way. Several new user options have been added to Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 and they include remove-from-result-file, debug-run, change-results-display-order, batch-install, reorder-result-file, edit-result-file, and rename-identifier-in-result-file. View the included documentation for details on new and existing Phoronix Test Suite options.

To sum up the key additions of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 "Bardu", they include the statistical significance control support, automated bisecting support on a performance basis, an overhaul of the GTK2 user-interface, many new test profiles, support for display modes, anonymous usage reporting, test recovery support, and software / hardware detection improvements. This makes up the key features in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2, but as mentioned, there are over 200 changes so far in total and we are only at the first beta. The Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 client is also now more than 50,000 lines of code

At least two more beta releases are planned for Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 prior to its final release in late November or early December. Going forward in the 2.2 cycle, most of the work will involve the addition of new test profiles with fewer pts-core changes, but the last major change should be full Phoromatic support with its public launch. PTS Desktop Live 2009.4 "Loderhof" will also be released this quarter following the Phoronix Test Suite update.

Download the latest version of the Phoronix Test Suite at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

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