Sensor Monitoring With PTS

Version 0.5 of the Phoronix Test Suite will be released later this week and already it has over 40 changes in this forthcoming release! There are quite a number of new profiles and features with this release, but one interesting feature that has just begun to evolve is the system sensor monitoring support. Now when tests are running within the Phoronix Test Suite, you can opt to have the Phoronix Test Suite keep track of system sensors -- whether it be your CPU/system temperature, one of the voltage rails, or even your battery discharge rate -- and upon the tests being completed the average sensor results are shown as well as a line graph of each sensor while the test(s) were running.

The sensor detection supported with Phoronix Test Suite 0.5.0 is the GPU temperature, CPU temperature, system temperature, battery power consumption, CPU voltage, +3.33V rail, +5.00V rail, and +12.00V rail. If you are using a newer version of the Phoronix Test Suite, you can run phoronix-test-suite sensor-options to see all supported sensors as well as the commands to poll each sensor value. For example, to monitor the CPU temperature while the universe suite runs, the following command would be used: MONITOR=cpu.temp phoronix-test-suite benchmark universe.

The Phoronix Test Suite relies upon LM_Sensors and ACPI for reading the sensor values. LM_Sensors is used as the default in the thermal sensor support, but if LM_Sensors isn't installed or mis-configured, it will fallback to using the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface in hopes that is properly working for the system. If you have LM_Sensors and/or ACPI properly configured and the results are not being reported properly for you within the Phoronix Test Suite, please report this information to either the mailing list or the PTS Forum. Reading of the GPU temperature is currently supported only for NVIDIA graphics cards using the proprietary driver as the Phoronix Test Suite is using the NV-Control Extension through nvidia-settings for polling this information. Thermal monitoring for ATI graphics cards will be supported once AMD releases the needed documentation to the LM_Sensors developers and/or provides the support within their Catalyst Linux driver.