Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland Milestone 1

The first development release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland is now available for testing.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 will be the last release in the PTS3 series when it's released later this quarter, which will then be succeeded later this year by Phoronix Test Suite 4.0. Within Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 will be more significant improvements to our open-source benchmarking / automated testing framework, some of which have landed in this "milestone 1" release.

The most significant user-facing work in Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 1 is the large internal re-work to pts_Graph, which handles generating all of the graphs and tables for displaying Phoronix Test Suite results. Read more interactive graphs for benchmarks to learn about the changes to pts_Graph that affect how these visuals are created. The improvements will allow for creating more interactive SVG graphs, faster rendering of graphs, and other special enhancements to the visuals on OpenBenchmarking.org. With Bygland Milestone 1, the pts_Graph should be generating graphs properly and similar to version 3.6, but some further work will still be landing this development cycle.

With Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 1 are also hardware / software detection improvements for ARM-based systems. Thanks to testing and verification work from the PandaBoard ES and CompuLab Trim-Slice, there's a variety of improvements to enhance the embedded ARM benchmarking.

The MATISK testing module in Bygland has also received a number of improvements. Read How-To: Find The Mesa Performance Regressions for details about this latest auto testing work.

Beyond these changes, there's also some internal code clean-ups, other minor enhancements, and prep work for further Bygland changes and early Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 preparations. Listed below is the official change-log.

To learn more about the Phoronix Test Suite or to download the latest release, visit Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. The Phoronix Test Suite is open-source under the GNU GPLv3 and is supported under Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD, Hurd, and Windows operating systems.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 1
17 January 2012

- pts-core: When time-zone is not set in PHP, attempt to query it from the host system
- pts-core: Fix for handling user variable swaps on the result identifier
- pts-core: Major enhancements to MATISK testing module
- pts-core: Fix for some hardware/software comparisons being turned into line graphs
- pts-core: Dump some common / important environmental variables to system log area
- pts-core: Migrate to a JSON-based graph configuration file at ~/.phoronix-test-suite/graph-config.json
- pts_Graph: New version of pts_Graph that uses SVG DOM IR directly
- pts-core: Allow pts_svg_dom to be converted to JPEG/PNG using new library as bilde_renderer replacement
- phodevi: Add some fall-back graphics detection support of Texas Instruments OMAP / Samsung EXYNOS
- phodevi: Fall-back graphics detection support for the ARM Mali
- phodevi: NVIDIA TEGRA hardware detection improvements (as tested on a TEGRA-2 CompuLab TrimSlice)
- phodevi: Further fall-back support for further detecting EXT3/EXT4 file-system from user-space
- phodevi: Improve Arch Linux OS detection on at least ARM platforms
- phodevi: Screen resolution fall-back of reading frame-buffer virtual size
- phodevi: Improved Intel chipset detection parsing from Xorg.0.log when /sys/kernel/debug/ isn't readable
- installer: Installer update